01:13:16 · Casey Handmer
[01:13:16] S1: I mean, I don't I don't really envy the rich. I mean, I am rich, but I don't envy the the super rich, I'll tell you why. The people who are significantly wealthier than I am, their lives are more complicated. Okay? They have private security. They're usually much older and in much worse health. They don't have privacy obviously. They have people actively trying to destroy their privacy. They're wealthy enough that they're surrounded by very few relationships and are not transactional one way or another. It's very hard for them to interact with other humans as humans. And the ones that are not ridiculously old or inherited wealth or whatever are by and large, like, cracked founders who have, by their own choice, but nonetheless extremely difficult professional lives. Right? So that usually, like, the family life is not quite there or whatever. Right? And you say, like, is that something you really want? I think that this this obsessing over income inequality is actually a negative thing. I think the optimum amount of income inequality is not zero, and a certain amount actually incentivizes success. It rewards success. It rewards hard work. It rewards innovation. It rewards technological development and as a result, it actually lifts the floor. So the thing you should worry about I think is not so much income inequality like some Gini coefficient nonsense. It is, like, are the bottom decile in our economic system starving, or do they have an opportunity to get on that ladder? Do they have opportunities to get educated, to try as hard as they can, to build a better life for themselves, for their children, for their grandchildren, for their communities, and so on. And on that front, I think The United States has always done a really good job. It's done a better job now than in the past perhaps, but The United States is accumulating wealth for people up and down the spectrum faster. People say, oh, the middle class has disappeared as though, like, what was the middle class seventy years ago, which is like, you know, some guy working hourly at the Lockheed plant, you know, putting his kids through some public school in in a car with no safety standards is the middle class. Middle The class has disappeared in The United States because people have left it through the ceiling.
01:15:11 · Casey Handmer
But these these things are not not well appreciated or educated or or taught or understood.