Alex Imas: belief

Transcript context

…Depends on how the reproduction is happening. Fair. But if we’re in the world where reproduction is still happening the way that it’s happening, I think… And this is a big question, I’m not making a prediction. You had David Reich on the show. His point on the last podcast was that we’re buzzing with natural selection. So even if you get some sort of indifference now, you might get selection to point into an even stronger preference for other humans. Here’s one way to think about it. How is the wealth of the richest people in the world instantiated? We were having a call earlier, and you made the point that their consumption is more geared towards relational goods. Like Mark Zuckerberg is hiring MMA instructors and dancers for his wife’s birthday, and so forth. But most of his wealth is just stock in Meta. As a controlling shareholder, he could say, “Meta, turn all this wealth into dividend income, and I will just spend that on consumption.” Instead, he would rather have his wealth compound and have Meta build more data centers. So you don’t even have to change humans for this to be the case. The humans who are wealthiest—and growing wealthier because their wealth is compounding—just have this almost Nick Landian preference for accelerating capital. That does seem to suggest that this is an important determinant of what kinds of things are produced in the future.…

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