I think one of my favorite things about me is my overbearing ability to disrespect.
I’ve been on a “listen to what the billionaires are saying” kick recently. In a former entrepreneurial endeavor I was helping someone on I was introduced to Tim Ferris’s books and podcasts. Tim Ferris then introduces you to a whole world of successful people who are trying to shape the very landscape of existence. In each of the interviews or after every new business book I read, I rarely feel “empowered” or like they’ve “broken down the barrier to success” despite this being their often stated goal. They believe they are offering tools for you to use in a make-your-own-adventure process.
I’ve had delusions of grandeur since I can remember. I’m the cliché who talks about being on different levels or having concerns in realms others don’t have the time or inclination to deal with. Luckily, I matched that spirit and ego with a desire to devour information. Then I could begin pattern forming and habit recognition. There’s rarely a book that won’t tell you to be passionate, take risks, crunch numbers and plan ahead. If it’s the tech world they’ll predict the next 10 businesses you should keep your eye on. If it’s a history book they’ll tell you how “quirky” or “different” the leaders at Walmart, IBM, or Amazon are. You also start to see that these books are the same ones the billionaires are reading given the stories they tell about each other or allusions to an individual’s stock language.
It’s not that I disagree with the energy, the visions, or the advice. If anything, I’m so entitled that I feel a certain kind of solidarity with how they advocate and the terminology and general “out there” perspectives they wear on their sleeves. It’s not that they’re solely egomaniacs that have lost touch of something more human or some other Mike Huckabee-esc comment meant to imbue special dignity to working-class sentimentality over “elitists” and “intellectuals.” To me, it’s like the idealism shifts the starting flag.
Let me try to make that clearer. The X-Prize is Peter Diamandis’s attempt to incentivize people to fix major world issues. He talks about giving every poor child a computer and seeing what happens. That became giving them tablets and tracking what they achieve. Education is clearly fundamental in any form of change or chance for poor societies to grow. It’s a selfless pragmatic view identifying a human need and throwing your back into helping. My impulse is to ask, is the child’s “biggest” problem at this point not having a computer?
An increasing idea is crowd funding and crowd sourcing. What’s better evidence that you have a good idea than people buying it before it exists? How awesome is it to fix problems in disease by plugging into a million brains to solve things our computers can’t yet? The idea is to simply ask people to win the kind of contests they’re good at. It’s finding the clock maker who solves how to navigate by longitude before the astronomers so ships stop crashing. In that sense, then maybe giving everyone a tablet means you’re bolstering your pool of insightful clock makers.
Is there not an elephant in the room named Income Inequality? There are certainly billionaires who do great things and have seemingly next to magical powers for foresight and enthusiasm. But it often feels like this kind of zero-sum game that you don’t stop playing until you have such an obscene amount of money it obfuscates all risk. Elon Musk in 2008 had all three of his companies Tesla, Space X, and Solar City on the brink of collapse. Had he failed, was it because he didn’t read the one more business book that would have helped or forgot to carry the 2 in some equation for the future? What would we be saying or looking forward to regarding electric cars, hyperloops, and living on Mars had things gone differently? What would a group of mere mortals do to transform transportation had we not been given very particular enterprising billionaires?
To me, it seems the more you get caught up in the language and vision of the future of the rich folks, you drift farther away from the billions of people looking like anything more than investment opportunities or a mass of “problems” to solve. Maybe humanity doesn’t need to be a node in your Earth’s-collective-conscious model of the future providing you with answers to your questions. Perhaps many people would do just fine if 1% of the population didn’t own half the world’s wealth. I don’t mean to suggest there’s something particularly insidious or malicious going on. There is, but not necessarily by this group of people. I don’t think there’s a kind of conspiracy. But I think I want my “giant leaps” into the future to not be predicated with this kind of “exploit until I can give back” set up. You always hear of the wins, not the litany of failed expensive tests that a few chosen companies get to run in pursuit of their next billion.
I think we sort of regard this process as a necessary evil. If we didn’t have them experimenting, we’ll never one day conceive of traveling to space like traveling to Costa Rica. These innovative and forward thinking companies are supposed to save us, so give them room. By what other metric are we supposed to ascribe “value” than in dollars and how “the market” reacts? If you don’t like it, join a monastery.
But I think we’re barking at a kind of “pick your poison” situation. We don’t necessarily have to defer to the opinions and visions of these companies for the dollar amounts they quote. I pick my poison by literally taking new drugs in clinical trials so I can run my own start-up experiments. I wish I didn’t have to. I wish to alleviate whatever screwed up the idea of education leading to job. I wish being passionate really mattered like it does as the glint in the night to these billionaires. No amount of listening to podcasts, reading how billionaires think, or poor kids with tablets is going to make someone from Poorville rub elbows with these people. And the exceptions to the norm are the ones with the loudest voices of how to be just like them!
This is closely coupled with my ability to denigrate what I think I know. I feel, almost scared, when I start to believe I have something figured out. It’s the moment you’re asking to be bitten. I can track cause and effect, sure. I can count. But I don’t have the kind of confidence that says “here’s my 3rd book on how you should conduct your life.” And that’s not from having little to say or believing I haven’t learned things. It’s that I think it takes the focus away from what the human experience is once it’s removed from what a subset of humans would prescribe it to be.
It feels like the wrong kind of selfish. It feels naïve. I don’t even know if it is these things, it’s just what it feels like. I would likely adopt an overt sense of pragmatism to protect my billions if I felt I was genuinely doing better “for the world” in spite of personal gains it afforded me. I just would want to avoid looking like an enthusiastic preacher. The land of the billionaire is no more real for the poor than heaven is for the believer. Here at least religion is explicit in how you need to die in order to get there.
