The Wisdom of Rich Guys
Have you seen these new ads, I think it’s some kind of complex AI scam, where people like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, just about any hyped-up rich pseudo celebrity is opening an ‘exclusive’ WhatsApp group, to share their vast knowledge about investing and how they got rich? Philanthropy and sharing their vast knowledge, further propagating the myth that there is an equivalence between wealth and wisdom. Some of the smartest men I’ve ever known were dirt poor, or at best solidly working class.
The first thing that I notice, in most of these AI ads, is the mouth movement doesn’t even come close to matching the spoken words. This makes me a bit nostalgic, taking me back to those great Japanese monster movies I grew up watching, where the actors are speaking their native language, but it’s overdubbed in English. Sometimes a guy would stop moving his mouth and the English overdub would keep going on for another few seconds. Man, that was great stuff…
But these things, the Bezos and Musk and Gates things, they are not great stuff. Not even good stuff. I’m truly baffled how the scammers get away with this. Maybe the celebrities don’t have the time or concern to go after this crap, but they should. I’ve had tinnitus since Covid in ‘22. It was quite bad for a time, and I fell deep into all the cure schemes. They are all scams, what a great business model. The best ones were with Kevin Costner and Morgan Freeman’s mouths moving while voices that sounded very much like thier own voices tried to sell me snake oil cures.
I’m going off in the weeds again, I can feel it! I’m trying to reel it back in.
My favorite of these WhatsApp ads is the one featuring Bezos. He’s my favorite fascist celeb, I hold him in a particular disdain thanks to what his baby, Amazon has done to the writing and publishing industry. Amazon and self-publishing have done amazing things for writers and given us game changing tools. But it has also flooded the world with tons of unreadable crap. Jeff and Amazon have a complex relationship with AI; on one hand they forbid AI generated books—good—on the other they encourage AI read audio books—no bueno. Their rules or not, the market is now even more flooded with soulless AI generated garbage.
But the ad with Bezos sitting in a chair that looks like a throne wearing a Nehru jacket and speaking in such a measured (albeit AI deep fake) voice, he gives off the aura of a deity and that deeply disturbs me and makes me wonder what the lives of these ridiculously rich must actually be like.
I don’t think the human psyche can absorb wealth at that level. Billionaires to me seem beyond the scope of human understanding, when you approach a trillion dollars—one man’s worth—what do you value? What do you cherish? I was thinking of this last week when I was rebuilding the carburetor for my ‘51 Ford. Does Jeff or Bill or Elon ever take the afternoon off and spend it out in the unairconditioned tool shed and rebuild carburetors? I hope they do, but I doubt it. Would they try and rebuild it or order a hundred carburetors and have them flown to their house that day? Would Jeff have a cherished 1951 Ford or a cherished 2002 Mustang or would they buy a hundred of each and drive them into trees because they are bored?
I’ve always been a grateful member of the proletariat. It’s genetic, it’s defining. Most days I love my work and what I do, no matter the task, some days I hate it and I want to walk away, but I keep coming back for more. Maybe that makes me a masochist.
I’ll choose to not take the advice on any subject from a man who has never dug a really good hole, or pried a particularly stubborn stone out of the earth or finally solved a mechanical problem that vexed him for a long time.
It truly galls me the authority we give up to the obscenely rich. I know a few guys in the heavy millionaire class, and they seem to still have ties back to their roots and how things work, and what’s right and what’s wrong. I think if and when you cross the line into the billionaire realm you lose something. Maybe it’s your humanity, or the understanding and appreciation of the function and beauty of an old farm tractor.
I’ve longed long believed that the few who find themselves amongst the super-rich didn’t get there by skipping the avocado toast and Starbucks, and brown bagging it. A lot of luck and place and connection made it happen. Bill Gates is a self-made man, the fact his mom was on the board of directors when IBM was looking for an operating system for the first personal computers is a coincidence, I figure. I don’t envy any man, least of all these men, I’m just grateful all that luck and good fortune that fell on them missed me.
I can truly say I’m glad I was spared all that. I always believe I’m more aligned with Tom Joad and Woodie Guthrie than Elon and Jeff and those guys.
That’s it for me this week. Here are some books to check out.
Stay safe, it’s getting weird out there.
Bill