Samo Burja and Wolf Tivy cover gerontocracy. Generational youth politics are a dead end: the “youth” will be old by the time they take power. Change can come only from empowering new classes willing to gamble on their own “nepo babies”.
Transcript
The problem of gerontocracy (00:00)
Wolf: Welcome back to “The Students.” I am your host, Wolf Tivy. Today, I’m joined by my friend, Samo Burja. We’ve been friends actually for a long time now. What is it?
Almost 15 years now, actually.
Samo: I think so, yes.
Wolf: Something like that.
Samo: Started as an online friendship, became in person. Yeah.
Wolf: So Samo, as some people know, is the current editor-in-chief of “Palladium Magazine,” the magazine that I founded. So obviously, he’s bailed me out there in big time, doing a good favor for me. Samo’s also the CEO of Bismarck Analysis, his strategic consulting firm—that publishes “The Bismarck Brief.” Very interesting strategic brief on the problems of the world and the live players that are driving world affairs. So, yeah.
Samo, welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on.
Samo: Pleasure to be here with you.
Wolf: Yeah. So today, I wanted to discuss, or I think one of the most interesting conversations that you and I can have—is this problem of gerontocracy. So, if we look around the world today, obviously, everyone’s getting very old, fertility rates are very low, and we see also a lot of complaints by young people about housing prices going up really high. The economy’s maybe not very good for young people. And we simultaneously see the kind of old versus young politics.
We see these memes about boomers and zoomers, and special snowflakes and vampire old people, and sensitive young men. All these terms that get thrown around, it’s indicative of a politics of gerontocracy. And if we look at the ages of politicians, I think our politicians are older than almost any other society that we’re recently familiar with. People called the Soviet Union a gerontocracy. I think our politicians are older than those.
People call Iran, or up until recently, a gerontocracy. I think they just killed all the old people there. Israel and the United States did. But they were a gerontocracy. I’m not sure exactly the age comparison there, but I think our politicians are still very old compared to that.
And so I wanted to get into this problem because people have called it pensionocracy as well. Once you have a class of people who are kind of collecting pensions at the expense of the young or collecting various sort of seniors benefits, whether it’s grandfathered in property taxes or the long growth rate on their property values or their 401Ks, whatever it is. Often at the expense of the working people, which is the young. You get this kind of politics of wealth transfer from the young to the old. And this seems to be also a result of democracy, especially with an aging population, the old come to outnumber the young demographically.
And so there’s all these problems that are kind of being set up, or that we’re dealing with, that are really problems of gerontocracy. And increasingly, I see frustration among young people, among our friends, who are worried about living in this kind of nursing home society that kind of gets described in this way. And so, yeah. Samo, I know you’ve studied a lot of these problems. You’ve really looked at matters of how civilizations work.
You’ve looked at the world in a great deal of depth through the “Bismarck Briefs.” Yeah. So I’d love to get your thoughts on the problem of gerontocracy, and then we can dive into just a discussion of all its very interesting aspects and how young people today and how really leaders today should be dealing with this stuff. So Samo, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Why power accumulates with age (04:14)
Samo: Yeah. This will be a topic we’ll explore in a whole lot of different directions, just because it touches, I think, on almost—
Wolf: It’s a big one
Samo: It’s a big one. It’s almost every aspect of human existence is at play. And perhaps because of this, when we talk about gerontocracy, that is rule of the old, by the old, maybe for the old—I think we have to acknowledge that to some extent, humans have always been a gerontocratic society. The basic social contract that does exist, and it’s not so much even a social contract, it’s just the fact is that we are born into the world helpless. Our parents take care of us.
And in theory, most people feel you should kind of take care of your own parents when you’re old. So that’s the most basic aspect is this desire to care for the helpless people of the tribe. And why am I raising this point, which seems—so far removed from our current experience? I’m raising it because I think that was the initial impetus, the initial moral impetus, for setting up things like a pension system, right? When the first pension systems were set up.
Wolf: Yeah. These fears of senior poverty—or frail and medically compromised old people—kind of facing old age either alone or unsupported. Yeah, there was a lot of, in many ways, horrifying things that could happen there to some people, and so there was this desire to solve this. And I think this is at least the rhetorical—position of the pension system. But I think another aspect, to your point, that human societies have always been gerontocratic, there’s another element that’s just a very natural element, which is that, like you say, you’re born helpless.
You have to build your power in the world, which means that it increases over time, which means that old people have the most power just by nature.
Samo: I think that’s true where again, we could sort things into things that are sort of checks on the power of the old—and things that enhance the power of the old. Right? So if you think of almost any source of power, be it, for example, the number of people you know, right? The number of favors people owe you. That will only increase over time up until the point that your primary social cohort starts dying.
Right? So if the Pope owes you a favor and the President owes you a favor, that’s a pretty big deal. But the Pope and the President are pretty old, and they might die any year. So even if you’re notably younger than them, let’s say you’re middle-aged or something like that, you’re already starting to lose some of your most senior contacts over time. So it’s almost a question of this sort of velocity, where how fast are you making these new social contacts over time?
How deeply are you developing those relationships? How fast do they go away? And most importantly, how old are the most powerful people in your society? So there’s a self-reinforcing aspect here. Where if there is elite circulation and young people join elites, then that automatically means that younger cohorts very quickly know other powerful people.
This softens the advantage of age. So there’s a way in which the social graph accelerates itself. So that’s sort of on social power, that’s kind of the first dimension. The second dimension, ironically, is age segregation. And here’s the funny one.
We have many very good reasons that we’ll get into later in the conversation for being critical, say, of the baby boomers. Honestly, people probably have good things to say about critiquing millennials, right? People probably have et cetera, et cetera, all of these valid critiques. But in fact, strictly segregating age groups favors gerontocracy, not the youth. Right?
If all your—
Wolf: Can you explain that one? How does that work?
Samo: Well, if all your friends are one or two years older than you, right? And the people who have been around the longest have the most power, well, okay, then your entire cohort and your entire friend group is disempowered, actually. Meanwhile, if it is normal to have cross-generational friendships, it’s basically a social fabric argument. Imagine a world where the rich never interact with the poor and there’s a wall between them. We have, through mass schooling, produced artificial categories where people feel more loyalty to basically just the random fact of which year someone is born to than to the more straightforward question of, like, “Oh, these are my children. I should be loyal to my children.”
Wolf: Yeah, or these are my—
Samo: Or, “These are my younger friends.”
Wolf: Or my parents.
Samo: Or, “These are the people I have mentored.” The very idea that you should mentor younger people completely is gone. But also the idea that, hey, actually, I should sort of find someone who’s the equivalent of a patron who’s going to help accelerate my trajectory. That’s also gone. So what I’m saying here is that if you have extreme age segregation, both intentional—because of hatred between the generations, and that’s actually a big problem.
We have hatred—from the old towards the young and from the young towards the old—across basically every generation. That’s problem number one. Problem number two, our culture is fake. Our culture is mass-produced. The TikTok algo changes, and suddenly you do not understand, let’s say if you’re Gen Z, right?
You’re older versus younger Gen Z. That has already become such a chasm—that we might as well call those different generations. And partially that’s the result of no longer having cultural evolution, but just a cultural download. And the cultural download kind of rapidly changes. And the one exception here is that actually there is also boomer cultural hegemony, and we’ll get into that because we bizarrely live in a world where simultaneously there’s the era of... Let’s put it this way.
Boomers dominate broadcast, right? And Gen Z and millennials get scrambled by the algorithm. Right? And in a way, the broadcast people are still in power even though broadcast is on the way out. So there is something to be said about boomers, like—
Wolf: Yeah. Well, there’s all these historical factors that go to making the kind of the boomers be this central sort of main character generation of the 20th century—
Samo: Well, that’s what I’m saying
Wolf: or the second half of the 20th century.
Samo: We’re not supposed to be stuck on the boomer transmission generation because their own, let’s call it mass broadcast culture—was already a radical severance with the past. They basically have very few, if any, valuable traditions to pass on. That’s the truth of it. But—
Wolf: That’s a good point
Samo: the point I would say is that, okay, we have physical segregation in schooling. We have a socially normative segregation, right? And I’m using the term intentionally. And then finally, we have irreducible, incomprehensible cultural chasms between generations that previously didn’t exist.
Wolf: Because our media forms changed. Yeah.
Samo: You might think that, oh, youth culture is rebellion against the old. Actually, there’s a weird way in which that’s actually disempowering.
Wolf: Yeah. Well, now you’ve ghettoized yourself from society. Yeah, I thought your point about—mentorship in particular and intergenerational relationships is really important because one of the best ways for an ambitious young man—to kind of find his way up in the world is to make relationships—with people who are already powerful—to build those trust relationships, to rise up as a son-in-law or as—a protege or as whatever he’s able to do. And that’s not possible if Generations don’t talk to each other. Which means all the young people are just shut out—of power.
All the old people are just there sort of looking at the young from afar, being like, “What a bunch of idiots. Why aren’t they able to do anything?” And that falls out directly from just the fact that we don’t have a lot of intergenerational relationships anymore. That’s very interesting.
Nepo babies versus meritocracy (12:28)
Samo: Well, to go back a little bit, to double-click on another point here. In addition to who you know and your friend group, your social connections. Who can do you favors? That’s super valuable in any system, be it the Soviet Union or modern America. And, in some ways, they are comparably corrupt at this point in history.
Where the only way to get things done is to know which rules to ignore and how to bypass kind of insane egalitarian rules that—dominate all life, both written and unwritten. And the other question still is of who formally holds the position? Here’s another one. Nepo babies are good for youth power. What is a nepo baby?
A nepo baby is a young person that’s accelerated.
Wolf: It’s a young person who’s receiving a transfer of power—from the old.
Samo: And they might not deserve it. But it is a young person wielding power. A nepo baby is way better than meritocracy. What does meritocracy bias? Legible accomplishments.
Who has always the most legible accomplishments?
Wolf: The old.
Samo: The old, right? So there has to be an essentially exuberant, irrational investment into a young person. You have to be slightly deludedly optimistic to give someone that has not done a job, a very senior position as quickly as you can. There is no Alexander the Great without monarchy. Why?
Because Alexander the Great inherits a fully working military from his father, Philip. Whether he and his father get along is almost irrelevant. I’m sure they had a bad relationship given what historical sources say, at least later in life when they were struggling for power. But at some point, there must’ve been some positive transfer as well. I’m not going to even comment that deeply on it.
It was just normal and socially legitimate that when you leave the world, a very young person potentially steps in your place. It doesn’t matter how young they are or old, as long as they were of the age of reason, which they probably thought was 16 or 18 or 21—or 24, it doesn’t matter. All of these sound like science fiction ages.
Wolf: I know.
Samo: Okay. Imagine if instead of Donald Trump right now commanding the US in its negotiations and war with Iran, it was his son, Barron.
Wolf: Yeah. That would be—
Samo: That would be historically normal
Wolf: a very different... It would be historically normal and a very different world.
Samo: And people today would criticize that. If Barron were to run, they’d be like, “Oh, you’re a nepo baby,” et cetera. So these are things that—
Wolf: Well, this is—
Samo: they feel. Okay, here’s the problem. The youth—
Wolf: I want to give a few examples of that.
Samo: No, go ahead.
Wolf: Yeah. I think it’s sort of often remarked that the average age in the NASA control room when we did the first moon landing—was about 26. This was a project of the young, right? And you could not imagine something like that today. That many young people in one place—wielding that much power.
Or you could see these examples like there’s some bunch of cops, they’re in their early 20s or something. They still look a little bit young, and people are abusing them online simply for being young. It’s like who gave these kids badges and guns? Because the old person who’s sort of become the dominant perspective—sees anyone under the age of 30 as like a baby. And so there’s these distortions that kind of come up by the fact that there is never any normalization of power being handed down to the young.
Samo: Even though the young are clearly much more physically capable—of doing the job of a cop. It’s actually one of the—
Wolf: Very physically capable
Samo: big advantages—of the youth is their physical presence and ability.
Wolf: Yeah, and also the raw—intelligence, right? People remark on mathematics being a young man’s game, for example. That in fields where it’s leaps of insight—that don’t require a huge amount of context, the young can really excel. And I think if you look back at the history of the British Empire, for example, you see these examples like I think Lord Nelson—starting out as a cabin boy and getting command of a ship by his teenage years—and admiral in his early 20s or something, right? And you don’t see that stuff happening anymore.
But it was obviously quite systematic that people—someone was trying to set up young people—in these positions of growth. And I think in many of these cases, it’s not even the nepotism of direct transfer from their—father or anything. In many cases, the young people are independently ending up in those positions. And so I wonder what’s changed there beyond just... So obviously we had this big cultural move—against nepotism in the 20th century.
We’ve got all these just aging population, there’s all the democracy, there’s all these other things that have kind of pushed against the young. And age segregation in schools. But I wonder about other, what are all these factors? If you were to design—a society that was going to empower the ambitious 15-year-old to have command, not necessarily of society, but of other people. What kind of society actually does that?
When would they do that?
Samo: Well, I think that, again, I open sort of part of my discussion with human nature. The basic is I don’t think you can... Okay. No more than the old can nag you—into a certain kind of behavior you really don’t want to engage in. It is not possible for the young to nag old people back.
Wolf: No. No, they have no power—
Samo: So you actually have to work—exactly. But you have to work with the natural motivations of the old. And you have to both appeal to their self-interest and their inclinations. That’s why I think actually, again, nepotistic societies are going to be more youthful—for a few reasons. I’m not sure they’re actually going to be very high TFR.
That’s why Italy today doesn’t work, right? Sicily doesn’t work. Everyone is super old. I’m sure they’re still very nepotistic. I’m sure they’re very clannish.
It’s just that, when uncles give favors to cousins, those cousins are now 50 or 60 years old. And, the societal structure, the demographic pyramid is F’d up. So the first one is, okay, the youth should be the majority of society. I think that implies actually a demographically expanding society. That implies a society going through range expansion or population growth or something like that.
And that’s another reason why the NASA control room was young. Even had they wanted to hire old people that were technically qualified, they could not. There weren’t enough in the whole country because the country had gone both through a baby boom. In fact, the boomers were once considered this rising tide of youth—and they sort of refused to let go of that. But the truth is, the subsequent generations of youth are just smaller.
Like literally smaller, right? There are just fewer people.
Wolf: Yeah, so demographics is obviously this huge component.
Samo: Yeah. It is the big one.
Wolf: To your earlier point, also—militarization, to the extent that you have a society that’s like the old British Empire, where a lot of upper-class norms are formed around—participation in the military—and the navy and various things. Those really do favor the elevation of the young. And I think also institutions like the military are going to tend to, because they’re constantly trying to recruit and develop new people, like the institution itself wants to recruit and develop new people. They tend to actually do that. But so much—I mean, maybe how much of this is connected to just the fake jobs problem?
Like if so many jobs in society aren’t really things that need to be done—but are more like sinecures where you just extract rents—from society, then they would naturally go not to the people who are best suited to actually get the job done, but the people who are best socially connected or best socially esteemed as someone who should receive those benefits. And that would seem to favor the old.
Samo: It really depends. It can cut both ways, right? Because you do have the European continent features, the perpetual student, right? The perpetual student is a type of sinecure, right? You basically don’t have to pay very much for your college.
You’re not taxed very much. Maybe you get special discounted student labor, and you then get to be a teenager for your 20s. So actually, at least you get to party, right? In a way—
Wolf: Yeah, but it’s sort of a—
Samo: maybe that’s better than the social contract that Americans get, but it’s a distraction.
Wolf: But it’s sort of a stunted adolescence, right?
Samo: It is, yeah.
Wolf: Because rather than an accelerated adolescence, it’s a stunted adolescence, right?
Samo: Well, it’s an extended one, right.
Wolf: Instead of you’re 15, you’re in charge of a squad, or you’re in charge of running the floor on some company or something.
Samo: But I’m saying being a grad student is a fake job. It’s doled out to the young, yet giving you a certain kind of fake job is almost like a sequestering. A hiding. Not every fake job gives you power is what I’m saying.
Wolf: Yeah. No, this is a good point. But there’s a class of fake jobs, as you say, like the grad student is conventionally young. It’s handed out to the young by convention and, just historically, for obvious reasons. But yeah, and it’s actually interesting how much the power of those people has declined, like the power of those positions actually—has declined over time.
Like the grad student now is, people joke that they’re no better than slaves, right? They’re sort of this person who will work for some old professor for nothing, right? Whereas maybe when academia was less expanded in the past, a grad student might be, well, they’re actually a protege—a beneficiary of mentorship who’s rising up in the world, and maybe they’re going to end up becoming this high-status doctor of philosophy or something. But these days, the PhD is sort of conventionally associated with the kind of failed career move, right? They got a PhD, and it was a mistake because they didn’t know the industry where they could actually gain power.
Which isn’t to say all PhDs are like that. I think, of course, many people end up with quite a lot of social power on the basis of a good PhD. But there’s these stereotypes that have been developing. And I think it’s indicative.
Samo: No, it really is. And when we say fake job, we can mean unproductive, or we can mean fake job the way the vice president is kind of a fake job. Some jobs, in especially offices and positions of power and responsibility, are sort of created because people in the hierarchy should be promoted. They feel like they should be promoted. Others view it as legitimate that they be rewarded.
They’ve done enough. They’ve been around for a long time. So you invent a fake layer of the hierarchy, right? So the junior assistant, secondary, whatever you add in front of the job title. Every time you add an extra layer on the corporate hierarchy, you do almost inevitably slightly increase the age of the people at the very top.
Now, it is true that eventually you reach a point where the people at the top are so old that they’re sort of like living mannequins, living mascots. I don’t actually think the congressmen who are so old are still in control. I think it’s Congress rules in the name of the oldest, but it’s not actually ruled by the old anymore.
Wolf: It’s all these young guys.
Samo: It’s ruled by the staffers.
Wolf: These young staffers. That’s interesting.
Samo: So there’s a weird way in which the power of youth becomes distorted if young people, and by the way, this is politics, so when we say young people, when we say speechwriter, that might be—
Wolf: Thirty
Samo: a gentleman that’s Norwooding worse than I am.
Wolf: Really? He’s in his 30s.
Samo: It might be someone, or 40s even. There are some people who are speechwriters in their 40s.
Wolf: Yes. That young guy in his 40s.
Samo: That’s just a dude. That’s just a man, just not an old man.
Wolf: At times—
Samo: It’s relative
Wolf: 40 would’ve been an old man.
Samo: True. But to be very direct in this, there’s something where even the ways in which we allow the exercise of power by young people today carry the pretense that it has to be done with the approval of someone else. And that goes back to our—
Wolf: Yeah. Or it’s hidden behind the scenes in some way.
Samo: It goes back to our aversion to wanting to have individual authority. What we want to do is have a world where everything is multilateral, nothing is unilateral. And because we want a world where everything is multilateral, everything is committee determined, this is an imagined world where everyone is extremely responsible, but no one can have unjustified power over anyone else. And then what does this do? It means you have to consult all the stakeholders.
And the stakeholders are old people. That’s why the sort of Davosian ESG thing also trends towards gerontocracy. That’s why managerialism trends towards democracy. Sorry, gerontocracy and democracy. This is why the stock market is actually gerontocratic, and we could talk a little bit more about why stocks are gerontocratic.
Why the stock market favors the old (26:14)
Wolf: Yeah, explain that one.
Samo: Well, simply, who are the best investors you know of that are famous in society for being good investors?
Wolf: Warren Buffett, for example.
Samo: Exactly, and Munger, and people who have deceased recently. The older you are, the longer stonk’s going up, and I’m being derogatory of them—because the stock market is, at this point, intentionally inflated as a matter of American political economy. It will favor the absentee owner.
Wolf: And the person who got in early.
Samo: Exactly. So look, if I am running a big farm, very tangible piece of property, it’s not on the stock market, it’s like the 1700s. Sure. The longer I run the farm, the better I run it, the bigger the farm will get, and all else equal, the older farmer will tend to be richer. But there’s a certain point where I’m no longer intellectually or physically capable of running the farm, and I hand it over to my firstborn, let’s say.
Or I sell it to someone. Anyway, the farmer has an automatic transfer, but if my stocks are being passively managed by a managerial class, there is no point in which my active ownership needs to be transferred to anyone. It’s already been actively managed by people that I hire. But in title, I retain full ownership and power. So it’s not like, honestly, the son should probably own the farm when he’s running the farm, but here’s another distorted way in which 90-year-old investors passively hold something, sort of course, they reap the benefits of decisions they made when they were 20 or 60.
And because I think private property is sacrosanct in our society, hyper-financialized, and commercialized, we can transfer something like what you invested into that farm into stocks. Do you see what I’m saying?
Wolf: Yeah, no, I see what you’re saying. And also part of this is one of these old guys who’s a great investor—they probably have a bunch of young analysts—who are actually—
Samo: But even the boomer
Wolf: figuring things out
Samo: The most clichéd boomer you can imagine, extremely bad investing—sells his house, goes on a cruise, has a big 401. Wait, why are we managing his 401? Why do we do boomer socialism, right? Boomer socialism with market characteristics. But that’s kind of closely tied to these capitalistic ideas we have.
You kind of can’t escape it if you believe in the stock market. I think if you slightly de-financialize capitalism, you actually rescue a lot of the pro-youth aspects of it, like disruption, et cetera.
Wolf: Right. If wealth comes from labor—effectively, then obviously it favors the young, because the young are the ones who are actually doing the work.
Samo: They can work more.
Wolf: They’re actually doing the work.
Samo: Though, of course, there’ll be always massive differences even between cohorts, right? Honestly, some people are just way more productive than other people. So, I have no doubt Elon Musk is much more productive than I am right now—
Wolf: No, but he’s—
Samo: even though he’s older.
Wolf: Yeah. Well, he does a great deal of good work. But actually, that reminds me, so there’s this whole aspect—that must be an aspect of the problem, which is the increasing wealth inequality—and the increasing share of returns to capital relative to labor—since the 1970s. And that would then be, by that argument, a gerontocratic force in society. That well, it’s the young.
Labor is really our bread and butter. That’s our leverage on the world—is that we’re able to actually do the work. But if—
Samo: Well, labor and beauty.
Wolf: Yeah, labor and beauty. Sure. Which is a sort of labor, but yes.
Samo: It is a type of labor.
Wolf: It is commodifying your body.
Samo: I mean, Clavicular has discovered that, and honestly maybe he’s discovered the Instagram influencers, the women who came before him actually had to work very hard. He’s not the... I guarantee you.
Wolf: Yeah. You’re going to be studying PubMed for your looksmaxxing tricks.
Samo: Look, I’m going to say it’s kind of like I find it hilarious that gender relations have advanced to the point where I think men are basically paying Clavicular to be beautiful out of spite—of seeing too many women get paid for being beautiful online. I think that’s actually the desire, right?
He’s maxing out an asset with a very short time window.
Wolf: Yeah. But one way or the other, I think the sort of direct earning potential that’s not from capital ownership—favors the young. And so—
Samo: And then you could fold also violence into labor in a way. Yeah.
Wolf: Violence is another form of important labor in the world ecosystem.
Samo: This is one fun case where we misattribute the production of violence in our society. When we speak of youths—that’s a euphemism. The people performing violence, perhaps called youths, are not that young either.
Wolf: Yeah. Or on the other hand, there’s various problems with that. We’ll put that aside for now, though. I actually want to discuss just specifically this sort of economic case. So if you have rising wealth inequality, rising returns to capital relative to labor—in all its forms, because of offshoring, because of mass immigration, because of various reforms to the economy that favor finance over labor, then that—
Samo: And favor predictable returns.
Wolf: Yeah. Well, the—
Samo: Especially.
Wolf: Yeah. Which favors capital.
Samo: Yes. Or the managers of capital.
Wolf: Both the managers and the owners.
Samo: Both. Yeah.
Wolf: Yeah. So that’s just another way, since the 1970s. If we look at kind of when did this happen? When did gerontocracy take root in America in its current over—sort of over-pathological form? I think we see the 1970s as I think this turning point—when the ages started to really stagnate on things.
Or the birth years. And that of course came along with the financial revolution that—
Samo: It possibly also came along not just with the financial, but with the technological slowdown. Let’s put it this way. In most societies through history, the richest person is usually among the oldest person you can think of. And it’s actually a slight anti-gerontocratic trend that some people have become very wealthy. So it really depends on—
Wolf: Right. It’s Mark Zuckerberg becoming very wealthy, a billionaire by 30 because he builds Facebook. Because there’s a technological frontier, he’s basically getting paid at a very large rate—for his labor. But he’s getting paid for his labor. He’s building something.
And that’s the reason he’s able to do that young, and it’s not some old capital owner who does it.
Samo: But we can analyze it as labor and capital, but I think we can also analyze it from the following perspective. Hey, I think it just is true that change is good for the young. Why? Because—
Wolf: Well, they’re fresh
Samo: they have nothing to lose.
Wolf: Yeah, they have nothing to lose, and they have fewer sort of prior commitments.
Samo: So if you slow down the rate of technological change, I sort of critiqued a lot of the assumptions. Which assumptions? A lot of our young friends who actually should be shaping the world, and I think they have a few beliefs that are actually holding them back, such as the idea that never do transgenerational friendships.
You have to at least be literate in different cultures of people, slightly older and younger than you—and you have to proactively do it. You’re not actually going to stay young even for five years. In five years, the kids are going to be unintelligible to you, even though you still feel like a kid at 25 versus 20. But they have one belief that’s correct. It’s this kind of idea that actually, technological change is kind of good for me.
Right? It’s kind of good for you because especially if it’s allowed to destroy old companies. Now, if it’s not allowed to destroy old companies, then you have this really bizarre situation where Intel keeps getting more valuable—even though it’s not doing anything new. Or Boeing still keeps getting more valuable. But at least there’s a frontier of new companies you get to make.
So, let’s put it this way. I think the San Francisco venture capital culture—might genuinely be a modest pro-youth force—within American society.
Wolf: Yeah, and I think that’s true. You meet friends of ours who are working—at these VC firms. They’re often quite young.
Samo: They’re young people, yeah.
Wolf: They’re young and dynamic. They’re allocating tons of money. And that’s a good point. This sort of technological acceleration is pro-youth.
Samo: Look, the old people have figured out AI, so in a way, AI is not that anymore. But if you were young in 2021 or 2022 or 2020, you had a way better shot of getting rich from AI—than if you were a Boomer or if you were a Gen X, or even if you’re an elder Millennial.
Wolf: I think it’s still true. But I want to follow up on—you started to get into a very interesting topic, which is kind of the things that young people are doing wrong, which there are many of. And now we have to kind of bracket this. As soon as you start talking about the things that young people are doing wrong, there’s always a bunch of resentful young people coming out of the woodwork.
Samo: Well, it’s also saying they’re doing something right.
Wolf: Yeah, they are. But if we start to ask, even to propose the young people have agency in this situation, that there’s something they could do, is whenever I’ve tried to discuss this, I’m not that old but I’m an old man now in my 30s. But I’m not that old. But whenever I’ve tried to discuss this, I often get an enormous amount of hate. It’s like by even just suggesting that young people have agency and something they can do.
And I think that’s because people are very used to seeing the callous boomer basically saying, “Let them eat cake.” Right? “Just pull yourself up by the bootstraps. It was easy for me,” or, “I worked so hard to afford my job—to afford my house in a nice neighborhood that only cost two times my annual income,” or whatever it was that the boomers got.
Samo: The boomer is partially callous because he earnestly and wholeheartedly believes in progress. So if I had a good time working the way I did—
Wolf: Surely we must be having a better time
Samo: and we’ve made so much social progress, Wolf. We’ve made so much social progress.
Wolf: Right. No, certainly.
Samo: I say with sarcasm.
Wolf: Progress.
Samo: Yeah. Then why don’t you go live in some of those same cheap townhouses I lived? Well, I don’t know, the odds of being stabbed are 10 times higher. Like in those exact townhouses.
Wolf: And the price is 10 times higher relative to your income. Yeah.
Samo: And the place has graffiti and kind of sucks, and actually when you lived there, it was a 10-year-old building. Now the exact same building is 60 years old. Right?
Wolf: It’s falling apart.
Samo: So it’s actually worse in a lot of ways. The starting position in society can get significantly worse. I will say though, the boomers did not show much agency in society, right? It was kind of a rising tide lifts all boats. And let’s put it this way, I feel all the boats are sinking right now.
If that makes sense. It’s sort of a shrinking pie.
What young people can do (37:43)
Wolf: But let’s take that as a background. We’ll see whether anyone’s able to respond to this favorably. But let’s take our background situation, which we’ve just described, which is gerontocracy—as a result of many forces. It’s really beyond anyone’s ability to influence. It’s not a choice, per se.
But what are the things that we can do in response to this situation? And so certainly as men in our 30s, we’ve tried to reach out to our younger generations to get younger people involved in things. We’ve tried to reach out to older generations. That’s, I think—
Samo: What I think we should also just make explicit is that we actually just ignore the old people and try to do our own thing for 10 or 15 years. I think we should be very explicit about that because I think a lot of people hallucinate that the millennial experience was in a way formed in this sort of direct subservience to the baby boomers, and it was actually a little bit counter-generational to do that, right? It was actually a little bit weird. As a millennial, you still had sort of enough hope that if you’re an intern and if you sort of work hard, it’s going to work out for you. I never succeeded or could make myself be someone’s intern, really.
So in a way, I wasn’t even following my own advice that well. Though I did try to work with other people of my same age to create new organizations. The problem is we made these new organizations, and it took 10 to 15 years, and look at us now, we’re old. So whoever believes themselves to be a great advocate of youth needs to realize that in order to achieve your objectives, by the time you actually have power to do anything, you yourself will be middle-aged. No, that’s actually real.
There can be no revolution of the youth because the revolution of the youth takes so long, they become old by the time they have power. So there has to be a weird way in which your ideology works for a pro-youth society, even if carried out partially by people who are old. And you’re like, “Oh, it’s easy. I’m going to find young people and tell them what to do and tell them how to do the youth revolution.” Wait, you’re already a boomer.
Do you hear yourself? Like, does Gen Z hear themselves? You fucking idiots. You’re going to be like fucking terrible boomers. You’re going to be talking about youth maxxing and jaw mogging, and you’re going to be talking about this shit 40 years from now.
So okay, you have to do something structurally different, and I think honestly, okay, I think figuring out this TFR garbage, like figuring out how to have kids irresponsibly because it’s impossible to have kids responsibly. That’s one of my takes. I think that’s a revolutionary act because that physically creates more young people.
Wolf: Yeah, I had a bunch of kids despite having very little prospects.
Samo: I had kids. I was like, either I’m a perfectionist and I wait till my 30s, or I have kids in my 20s. So I had kids in my 20s. Okay, so I divorced later, whatever. Not perfect, but hey, they’re two young boys now—who are going to be youth in eight years.
That’s better than not, right? I could’ve been sterile. Many of my millennial peers are still sterile at 37. At my age, 37, a lot of them have not reproduced. Many of them will never reproduce, and therefore they biologically contribute to it.
So I think, look, everyone has the agency to irresponsibly have some extra kids. And honestly, our system is so bizarre, right? Because it rewards irresponsibility.
Wolf: But that sort of pushes on the margin.
Samo: That’s almost guerrilla warfare against the middle class.
Wolf: But it pushes on the margin a little bit. It’s like, okay—
Samo: It’s not a revolution. I agree. It’s not a revolution. Yeah
Wolf: we have a few more kids. But it’s like, that’s costly to the individual—
Samo: It is
Wolf: and subsidizes society, right? And so I think a lot of people are turning away from that in ways that I find very misguided, but I think they’re turning away from that. They’re saying, “Okay, that doesn’t actually make sense for me,” or, “I don’t see how that kind of can benefit me.” Really, what it looks like to me is we need some way to circumvent the system on behalf of the youth, right?
Samo: Well, there is a small way in which it does benefit people. Mm-hmm.
Wolf: There needs to be ways that young people can kind of gain power despite the situation, despite this gerontocratic situation. All this rent extraction from the young, how can you avoid that, right? That’s maybe a key question.
Samo: I think it’s very hard to avoid all of that extraction. But I’m going to insist on my previous point where I think a lot of people want to have kids one day after the revolution or whatever. Just live your life assuming there is no revolution, and just ruthlessly just do what you’re going to do. Just sort of YOLO it. Think of it as investing in a shitcoin.
Okay, I’m doing a baby now.
Wolf: Babycoin, yeah.
Samo: I’m 22. Heck, why not 17? Literally, disregard all anti-fertility instructions immediately. It’s sort of like they’re designed to enslave you. Why?
Because they defer your desire to have a kid and produce all these fake loops you’re supposed to jump through, which are themselves a form of taxation. That’s what I mean.
Wolf: That’s a good point.
Samo: That’s what I mean, yeah.
Wolf: A lot of the fake hoops are forms of taxation.
Samo: Yes. Or the other forms are, okay, routes to the fake jobs when you’re the assistant to the CEO or the vice president of this or that, right? Those, you jump through hoops and you work for someone else, usually older. The hoops of, oh, I’m going to have a middle-class life. No, middle class is over.
Middle class is over. Middle class is for the boomers. We do not live in a middle-class society, and we never will again. Something different’s happening, so ignore respectable middle-class life. Just get what you can from where you imagine yourself being 40 or 50 years from now.
And it’s like, is it fun sharing a room with five people? It fucking sucks, and it’s unfair. It’s terrible they do this to you. But hey, at least they didn’t geld you. Right?
They didn’t sterilize you. Or maybe they did, in which case, I’m super sorry. You can always go sue the doctor, actually. There is a youth antisocial aspect that I think is healthy. Because you have so little stakes in the system.
I don’t know.
Wolf: That you actually should be a little bit antisocial.
Samo: You should be a little bit antisocial, and you should flagrantly disregard the social systems designed to exploit you. And if you can clearly explain to people why you’re flagrantly disregarding them, that is a form of cultural change. Now—these are low-agency activities because you told me, “Oh, youth are allergic.” And you’re totally right. They’re allergic to being told to have more agency.
Wolf: No, but okay, but let’s also explore—the high-agency activities.
Samo: Let’s do that, yeah.
Wolf: So I think mentorship is actually an interesting one.
Samo: It is interesting.
Wolf: It’s implied by what we’ve been talking about so far. Is if a young man is able to find mentors—find older people who are willing to talk to him—that’s an advantage to take. That’s something to take advantage of. And what I notice, at least it seems to me, this is the stereotype of zoomers from older people—which I don’t know how true this is from their own experience, but the stereotype is zoomers seem to be uninterested in that. Right?
It’s sort of like this sullen, extractive mindset where it’s like, oh, I’m not getting paid enough to talk to someone older than me, right? And I find that interesting, but it seems like there’s nonetheless a huge gain to be had there, right? Old people actually do like young people.
Samo: That’s the weird part, yeah.
Wolf: They do like particular young people.
Samo: That’s true.
Wolf: If you make friends with them, I think there’s actually some kind of advantage in that.
Samo: They do particularist favors, right? It’s kind of funny part, they will do you specifically favors even if they never betray their 401. Or they never betray their professional interests on a class level. They will do individual favors. And also, again, you have to have this full idea of what will I personally do when I am more successful than I am now—and proactively do it.
So I do think that there’s this strange transformation where I think antisocial is positive until you are society. And then it’s just antisocial. Here’s the weird part. The youth revolution won and gave us gerontocracy. The baby boomers won—and they gave us gerontocracy.
So if millennials win, they’re going to give you—
Wolf: A new—
Samo: a gerontocracy with millennial characteristics.
Wolf: A new gerontocracy.
Samo: Here’s a fun one, Wolf. We like Bitcoin. But you’ve heard the jokes about the multi-coin nobility, the one-coiner free people—and the no-coiner losers? Well, that’s a cohort effect. So if hyperbitcoinization happens, that actually doesn’t do shit for young people.
It helps us in our 30s—
Wolf: Well, ironically—
Samo: and the 40s and 50s
Wolf: and ironically, that’s all 10 years ago, and nowadays—nowadays, Bitcoin kind of moves with the stock market.
Samo: It does. It’s a stonk. It’s a stonk.
Wolf: So it’s like—
Samo: Even the US federal government now holds it in the Sovereign Wealth Fund, right? So there’s a weird way in which, look, if you want to be galaxy brain pro-social and pro-youth, you actually have to be, in a weird way, not self-interested and identify with the greater organism and the whole. And I think only the organic perspective favors youth. And what does it mean to favor youth and new energy in that sense? It I think means that you favor the biological and spiritual recreation of society.
Not merely replicating the shitty patterns that exist now, but to be recreated, to be this fire, this living thing, right? And I think we live in an old man’s frozen idea of what a society for the youth looks like. And I think the most important thing people can do is not have that frozen idea.
What old people can do (48:14)
Wolf: Yeah. So let’s now turn to the matter—of what old people can do. Because I think there’s also—a lot of old people who have seen the problem—and want to—help somebody, right? And so the question is, because it’s very easy to blame people who are the beneficiaries of a system, but that’s often not actually what’s going on, right? They are just riding along on the system, right?
The individual baby boomer parent doesn’t necessarily have that much power to change the overall situation. However, I think they do have the power to do things like buy their kid a house, right? And I think some of them do this. And so it’s very good—
Samo: It’s very admirable and good when they do. Yeah
Wolf: because it’s no good if you die at 90, your kid is 60, and they inherit your money when they’re 60—
Samo: But then they have no kids themselves
Wolf: and it’s like, okay, but they’ve already missed the boat, right?
Whereas if they get their inheritance at 30 or late 20s, now you’re talking about that can really change the trajectory of someone’s life. That can be a meaningful transfer of power to—the young. It can actually accelerate your legacy. And those sorts of arguments and those sorts of explorations seem very interesting.
And I think a lot of old people, they want to see something hopeful in the young.
Samo: Oh, yeah.
Wolf: And they want to see some kind of legacy in the world. I think we stereotype boomers often as having total disregard for these things. It’s like, “Oh, I don’t care. I’ll be dead.” They just set their money on fire on the cruise ships and the—medical homes and stuff.
But I think there’s also sort of this desire to kind of help out the younger generations. And I don’t have a lot of personal experience of that. I don’t have a house to give to my son, and he’s not old enough anyways, right? But I wonder if there’s things like that we can identify that would... But these are all also all these marginal things, right?
It’s like, okay—
Samo: They are marginal. Yeah
Wolf: maybe one family can escape the problems of—
Samo: It’s similar to just making more kids, right?
Wolf: Yeah. It’s like—
Samo: Helping your own kids is good and nice, but then you have to actually help them, and it’s not going to be like building character or whatever. That’s honestly probably too late. Though I will admit—the environment is worse. They’re probably addicted and genuinely fucked up. Okay, here’s the part young people don’t want to hear.
I can tell my own generation was notably fucked up in new ways that the previous one was not. And I can tell the current generation is fucked up in ways that the previous ones were not. And it’s basic things like attention, your brain being scrambled by attention, the normalization of, for example, schizophrenia-inducing drugs, like in a straightforward way, right? I know it’s uncool to say it. I was in favor of weed legalization when it was illegal.
Now when I see what it does statistically, medically, shit. Alcohol—
Wolf: It just makes people insane
Samo: okay, alcohol kills the old. After a lifetime of being a drunk, you die from insulin shock. Heavy uses of, straightforwardly, some of the most popular drugs and also psychedelics of our generation results in young people frying their brains. So we’ve actually become biologically a more hazardous environment for young people—just through changing the default drug to one that causes, in some small proportion, psychic breaks. So—
Wolf: No, we’ve all seen plenty of those
Samo: So you can’t really actually help your kids if they’ve gone through a psychic break or if they are ideologically indoctrinated by school to hate themselves. Here’s another challenge for young people. If you disenfranchise all the olds, I think your taxes go up.
Wolf: Right. Well, yeah, because most of the young people are even more insane than the old people.
Samo: And it’ll be transferred, at least if you go by opinion polls, right? So if you vote Green, pensions aren’t going down, but welfare transfers, like in the United Kingdom, if you vote—the Green Party, but maybe immigration goes up and the communities that are 70% or 80% unemployed, maybe there’s now 10X of them. So you’ve actually not, in a weird way, even become rich yourself, though maybe completely unrelated people to you, maybe they’re a little bit richer. So with that, we have to also say youth versus old is not absolute. It’s just one axis—of difference, alliance, military, political, economic competition.
Wolf: Well, and it may be that actually the youth versus old kind of political lens that gets—thrown around is just totally useless because it might matter a lot more, and even from the perspective of promoting—a kind of youth, it might matter a lot more for people to kind of favor their own, for example. One of the big crimes of the boomers, so to speak—is not just that they don’t like youth or that they—don’t favor youth, it’s that they don’t favor their own, right? They don’t favor their own families. They don’t favor their own—nations. They see themselves as kind of redistributing wealth to the world—rather than redistributing wealth—to their own children or to—their own community or something.
And so that sort of is maybe one big lesson to draw. Not that anyone will draw this lesson, but societies of the future, if they’re going to work—ought to have a lot of orientation towards promotion of themselves—their own community, rather than these kind of—
Samo: I think the—
Wolf: third worldist coalition politics.
Samo: Look, I do think let’s put it this way, I think the old benefit from the power of youth. Why? Because you can have more functional societies that way. And it’s this sort of weird America cliché to imagine 19-year-old Alexander Hamilton sort of debating something with aged Benjamin Franklin. But actually, it’s how things are supposed to work.
You’re supposed to have a human repository of knowledge basically debating like a super fast computer, like a super fast neurotypical developed mind, or atypical perhaps in some ways other than high intelligence. I think that there is a way in which the organic conception of society balances these fairly well, and our problem is a broken underlying political economy of which gerontocracy is one dimension. Where I think, let’s put it this way, democracy used to be a force against gerontocracy. Now it is a force for. So maybe opposing democracy favors the productive youth, right?
Wolf: Yeah. Well, it depends what you oppose it with.
Samo: Exactly. For example, careerism. Clearly at one point when NASA had 27-year-old people in the control room, NASA was not 27 years old. It was impossible to have a 50-year-old NASA controller because NASA was formed 15 years before that picture was taken, right? Or 20 years maybe at most, if you take its predecessors, right?
So it’s sort of like when you have a society that undergoes rapid technological and political change, you have a lot of intake of young people, and sort of bureaucratic careerism is good for them. But when you have a stagnant society, like an old-growth forest, I think we should be anti-careerism. I think we should be anti-CV, anti-careerism, anti legible reasons to hire or fire people. We should be anti-education, formal education, not like acquiring knowledge. We should be proactively seeking to limit the majority and favor the few positions of this unprincipled youth power that exists in our society.
And there are not many of them, right? For example, in America today, if you were to sideline Congress, I think you increase youth power. If you were to devolve power from the judiciary to government, to governors in some way, right? Governors are pretty old. They’re younger than Supreme Court justices, right?
And we actually have to do reforms that are very fundamental. We have to just bar—well, let’s put it this way. I would say that you can’t run for office for the first time above a certain age, and you can only have so many terms, is like one sort of push in that direction.
Wolf: Well, there’s all these sort of imaginary changes we could make. We invert the social, the current sort of social contract is like—
Samo: But I think old people can advocate for some of them, right?
Wolf: Yeah. No, we can all advocate—
Samo: There’s always someone older than you
Wolf: but this sort of presumes a functional democracy that we don’t have.
Samo: Oh, I don’t believe in a functional democracy, which I said sideline Congress. I didn’t say pass a constitutional amendment. Look, Congress does not want to govern anyway. Not really. It doesn’t want to be responsible for anything.
Okay, there are other parts of the US government that govern in the name of Congress, but Congress doesn’t want to govern. Which is why, in a way, maybe the old congressmen are this bizarre form of scapegoat where sure, it’s a problem that they’re there, but if you remove the old congressman and put a young congressman in, perhaps they will be just as beholden to the exact same forces as the old congressman, and they will also refuse to pass laws. It doesn’t matter that they’re 40 or 30 or hypothetically even 20. Maybe it’s sort of this situation where young people don’t try to do that because they sort of know it doesn’t matter as much as you would think. And I don’t know, I sort of feel like the startup bro is this theoretically young person.
It’s an archetype of a theoretically young person. Then there is the young military commander who barely exists in our society because militaries have become bureaucratic. So maybe then we modify it to be the Special Forces member. Okay? The problem, though, is the robots are killing the Special Forces guys.
Right? So shit. We’re destroying the biological foundation of youth power, and we need youth power actually checking the gerontocracy, and also we need it to be exercised directly rather than indirectly. So it’s kind of like it goes back to this basic tangle of our political economy, which just perpetually favors let’s call them comfortable-with-the-decline investors. Or comfortable with or heads-down careerists.
So I think that making society politically more dangerous is good because it increases variance.
Wolf: Yeah. I think that—
Samo: So that’s what I’m going to say at this point, and that might be, and when young people hear this, they might assume that I’m like, “Oh, go throw Molotov cocktails or whatever.” No, unfortunately, only the state-approved revolutionaries are allowed to throw cocktails. You will be put in prison into a box for 30 years. It means something more subtle.
The youth revolution can’t be for the youth (59:49)
Wolf: Yeah. But I think that is maybe one of the most interesting ideas we’ve touched on here, is that argument that in an age of stagnation and in an age of gerontocracy, it actually becomes rational and correct for the youth to become antisocial.
Samo: Well, let’s put it this way. I think being organized, antisocial in the sense of, okay, maybe there is a little benefit that can be wrung out of having strong generational identities the problem with strong generational identity is we’ve sort of gone back and forth on it through the conversation. If a young generation seizes power, they will govern in their own name. They’re not going to govern in the name of the generations that follow. Therefore, the organic balance of society where 20-year-olds occasionally command armies, or maybe by default command armies—or fight in armies at least, rather than have that just be robots or are—occasionally given money and reputation to be recognized as brilliant scientists, that is not restored by the revolution of a given generation.
However, a generation that perhaps breaks through the worst aspects of our system and permanently changes the institutions, that generation might do that.
Wolf: Well, I think maybe it’s less that there should be a rev—
Samo: Well, let’s put it this way. Maybe I’m even arguing the youth revolution cannot be a revolution for the youth.
Wolf: Yeah, I think I agree with that. I think the youth revolution should not be a revolution for the youth. It should be a revolution for some segment of society that, I don’t know what the specifications are, but basically, I would say fight for some approximation of your own community. And what that will mean is that contains both making alliances with older people—who are in that community, and transferring power—
Samo: It contains mentoring younger people
Wolf: yeah, mentoring younger people within that community.
Samo: Making more younger people.
Wolf: Making more younger people, transferring power to those younger people—and disrupting established society—on behalf of that community. And so this is just the unfortunate...
From the perspective of a sort of pro-social person, civilized person, this is bad advice. It’s like we’re saying, basically, you should start a prison gang, more or less. But if you live in a prison society, you should start a prison gang. It actually—
Samo: And maybe one day a prison gang imprisons all the other prison gangs, and then we can live beautifully like they do in El Salvador.
Wolf: Right. Exactly. Yeah. So, this is maybe the basis for the old observation that the young are much more revolutionary than the old. The young are more antisocial than the old.
Maybe this is just rational behavior, and it’s actually correct.
Samo: Well, in a way, it’s rational behavior. In a way also, the youth are a little bit autistic and psychopathic. I know that the older you get, the kind of weirdly more meek you get, the more socially aware you get. It’s kind of weird and disturbing.
Wolf: No, that’s a good point.
Samo: But I like it. I was too antisocial 10 years ago.
But it is the case, though, that you have to be... Well, I think it goes back to the problem of conflict and conflict tolerance. I actually think the old are way too conflict avoidant structurally. And even if we don’t mean literal violence, I think even a willingness to engage in political exertion—is greater with the young people specifically. With young men to be—even more precise.
Let’s be even more precise.
Wolf: Yeah. It’s young men. But—
Samo: Young women are usually not revolutionary. Though young women wield a lot of power.
Wolf: There are ones that are.
Samo: They usually do it in establishment ways, right? It’s hard to deny that Bonnie Blue in Britain is an establishment person. It’s hard to deny that the young Hollywood starlet is an establishment person, no matter who they are. Right? So it’s actually young men we’re talking about.
They have that antisocial impulse in them, and it’s necessary, and I would declare it not antisocial. It’s variance-seeking. We need to seek variance in our society because we’ve optimized ourselves into a death trap. And we need to kick the door open before our whole civilization gets fucked.
Wolf: Right. We need some segment of society—to basically start thinking of itself more as its own sovereign tribe against the death trap society—around it. And empower itself against that. And that will be driven by young people. We don’t think it should be driven in the name of—
Samo: But it will not be exclusively young people—
Wolf: It won’t be a generational—
Samo: who are part of the winning... Yeah
Wolf: it won’t be a generational revolution. It’s not like The Who, “My Generation.” It’s—
Samo: There’s never going to be a Woodstock for millennials, and there’s never going to be a Woodstock for people that grew up on TikTok, either.
Wolf: And if there was, it would not be—
Samo: It would be terrible
Wolf: it would not be a good thing.
Samo: It would double down on all the boomer pathologies.
Wolf: It would just create more of the same problem. Yeah. So this is an interesting conclusion. I feel like we’ve talked through a bunch of the theoretical problem here and tried to explore ways that anyone can get any kind of traction on this. But it seems like the most promising thing—is really this sort of, let’s call it revolutionary action by s—or—
Samo: Or reconstitution—or whatever you want to call it.
Wolf: Yeah. I mean—
Samo: Or recreation, because—
Wolf: I mean, I know revolutionary is a bad word. The police come and arrest you, the secret police start to perk up their ears, but—
Samo: The journalists write their hit pieces
Wolf: to be just sociologically correct—we’re talking about revolution. Not necessarily in the classic communist blah blah blah sense, but some kind of change—
Samo: Regime change. Regime change—
Wolf: Regime change is what we’re talking about
Samo: and societal rejuvenation, and hopefully a new golden age rather than just the dissolution of death.
Wolf: Yeah. But, so some segment of society that wants that—and can deliver that—needs to organize itself to seize power, and that will be the solution to gerontocracy by nature. I think the interest—
Samo: But that’s an extremely high agency ask, right? It’s actually way higher agency than like, “Oh, make a company,” right? It’s actually like, “Oh, wow, you are going to have to look around with all the other people who do not have a stake in preserving a death trap—of a system.”
Wolf: You have to go find your fellow students and—
Samo: Exactly. Your fellow students, yeah
Wolf: and study the problem and form some kind of cadre. And so, yeah, I like the ideas that we’ve settled on here. I think this is worth a lot more thought. But I think this is also a good place to end the conversation. Thank you, Samo, for coming on.
This has been very interesting. I think we’ve gotten maybe one step closer to solving the riddle of gerontocracy versus meritocracy—where meritocracy is taken to be a youthful society. And some interesting conclusions. I’m going to have to go think about all of this a lot more.
Samo: I’m definitely going to think about it more, too.
Wolf: Yeah. All right. Well, thank you very much.
Samo: Thank you.
Wolf: Until next time.