John Steinbeck wrote that we see ourselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires." We Americans really believe that we will become wealthy someday. In fact, 44% of people think that they will become a billionaire one day if they work hard. Is that actually how people get rich?

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(Describer) Title: Uno Dos of Trace. Trace Dominguez:

Hey there, nerd-illionaires. You love billionaires. Billionaires have a special place in our culture. Americans love them. Why? Because we think they're deserving, because we equate wealth with goodness, and we think that we like these deserving, good people, even though they're strangers. We do not know them. Combined together, this is a potent cocktail of neuroscience that deludes some people into attacking strangers on the internet about Taylor Swift. She's not a billionaire yet, but do billionaires actually earn it by working hard? Is that how people get rich? I wanted to know. Science actually says wealth is assigned randomly. It's just luck. If it were talent, then all talented people in the world would be wealthy. The smartest would be the wealthiest. The most beautiful would be the famous-est. We would assign resources based on the attributes we care about, but that's not reality, is it? Nature does have some mathematical norms. There are just as many tall things as short things with most things hovering around the average. Think of a tree, right? There are just as many tall trees as there are short trees of that same species, and most of them around an average height, and that goes for everything. There are just as many geniuses as idiots. Most of us hover around the middle, right? This is pervasive across talent, hard work, risk-taking, and so on. It's called the bell curve or normal distribution. Maybe you remember that from school. So, even though living things typically do follow normal distribution, wealth, it doesn't. It looks like this.

(Describer) Up and flat.

Researchers wanted to know why, so physicists created this computer simulation where people that they put into the simulation followed normal distribution in terms of their skills. There were some talented people, some untalented people. Most people were in the middle. In the simulation, sims had random events that could increase or decrease their wealth. So, after running the program 10,000 times, they found 80% of the wealth landed with 20% of the sims, approximately. People believe it's solely due to talent, intelligence, risk-taking, skill, smartness, effort, willfulness, hard work. That's in part a quote, but randomness was the biggest factor, and if wealth was only based on talent or IQ, it would track to that normal distribution, but it doesn't. A separate decades-long longitudinal study agreed. As sim researchers said, quote, "People commonly underestimate the importance of external focus in individual success stories." Wealthy people, they're more Domino than Tony Stark. So, if normal distribution is this, and the wealth curve is this, what is that? It's the 80/20 principle, named after Vilfredo Pareto, a turn of the 20th century philosopher and economist. It's talked about a lot in business and productivity. It's not a law of nature or even a rule. It's more of an observational principle. Think of it this way. 80% of book sales, they say, are from like 20% of authors. 80% of crashes come from, they say, 20% of bugs. It is a useful if flawed principle. We know this about wealth, don't we? We prefer to think that it's not random. Flip a coin with a friend. This is a 50/50 probability every time, but if you get heads over and over, you start to tell yourself that you deserved it, right? But it's literally just random chance. There's no story there, no matter how you think there is one. Another example is Eric Yuan. He made fricking Zoom. He's clearly talented and a billionaire, but what if there was no pandemic? He's a billionaire because random things came together for us all to be using Zoom in 2019. Had you heard of it in 2018? It existed for nine years. That software existed at the right time to make him rich. It wasn't just talent. It was this other giant thing, this really big global event. But random events, they aren't satisfying to human brains, so we say that Yuan is talented, successful, a hard worker. He worked for nine years and he deserved to be rich, but none of us knew there would be a worldwide global tragedy. That was just chance. His software happened to do what people wanted it to do at that moment, easily enough, and it caught on, and then we celebritized that individual and tell ourselves the story is that he's talented and a hard worker, which I'm not saying he's not, but it really comes down to randomness and the math supports it. So, if billionaires are billionaires because of randomness, then why do we celebrate them at all? In the US of A, we conflate wealth with goodness. We look up to rich people and we tell stories about them, which is why, quote, "People of high socioeconomic statuses are, on average, rated as more physically attractive than people of lower status." Yay, which I'm sure plays out even if you lie about who is wealthy and who isn't. Put another way, an economist wrote, quote, "I am bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, and stupid, but I have money. Money is the supreme good, therefore its possessor is good." This was in 1844, and we celebrate the wealthy

(Describer) Karl Marx.

in part because we sort of evolved to do it. Evolutionary biologists weighed in on why we like it and they think that maybe we think it's a skill. Ancient human-like primates would group around leaders who had skills. Knowing which ancient primate had the skills and what they liked and how to stay in the sociocultural fabric of that little pack was important, and that evolution sub-routine may still be kicking around in our ancient brain. Deep down, if we think of wealth as a skill, then we want to know how to do it, and thus we celebritize the wealthy and tell stories about their deservedness to convince ourselves that they earned it, because if they earned it, then we can learn to earn it too. They didn't, and it's probably random. They're definitely not like hunters or amazing athletes or artists. They're just randomly wealthy. Hiltons, Trumps, generic venture capitalists, CEOs. They have skills, I'm not saying they don't, but why do we care about them? Because they have money. We weirdly allow them to claim the wealth as a skill for fame. There are lots of celebrities whose main stat is wealth, but when you apply the study that shows, with 10,000 repetitions, that people get their wealth randomly, it means that you will probably never learn that skill, because it never was a skill at all, and yet breaking that story is so hard. Note, I keep kind of defending billionaires and rich people here. I don't know why I'm doing that, but it's because of cognitive dissonance. I do know why I'm doing it, actually, now that I think about it. It's really hard for our brains to hold that a billionaire deserves it, but somehow it's random. We hate those two, 'cause they are mutually exclusive ideas, but we actually do technically hate billionaires, so maybe it's fine. [laughs] Let me explain. Look at this human. They are a billionaire. How does that make you feel about them? Do they have a story? Where did they come from? Okay, how about this gaggle of gazillionaires? They all flew in on private jets. They spend more money in a week than you will in your whole life. How do you feel about this group of billionaires? Do they have a different story, a different feeling? Cornell and Ohio State showed 2,800 people pictures like this and found we like rich individuals. We fantasize that they worked hard. They're smart or creative. Sound familiar? In a group, though, billionaires give us the icks, and the reason we like individuals is called the streaking star effect. We want to see a person do well. They're the star. But a group? Meh. People generally like, I don't know, Rihanna. Rihanna is a billionaire. Three in ten Americans think billionaires as a group are bad for the United States. Is she bad? No, but, billionaires, they aren't great. That feeling is cognitive dissonance. Ooh! Buddy!

(Describer) Clone Trace:

Primey, I don't like that. What the? You've been here this whole time? Of course I've been here the whole time. Were you not paying attention? And I definitely love Rihanna. Some random glut of billionaires, though? Take 'em or leave 'em. Okay, great. I'm glad you're here. Why do you love her? Like, do you love her music? Yes, I do. Of course, I do too, but why do you love her? You know, like, what do you know about her? Are you friends? Okay, no. Not as such. I like her work, and as a clone of a child of immigrants, I like her story. Okay, okay, okay. Oh my gosh. You're right. What? I like what she represents, and this story is really about me and what I am and how I feel, not about her. Exactly. Whoa. She's an amazing artist with a relatable background, but you don't know her and you chew loudly. What if she has misophonia? You'd hate each other. Okay. Pump the brakes. I don't chew that loudly, but come on. I have to think about this for a bit. Go back to your thing. And this thinking can apply to anyone you don't really know. Athletes, politicians, actors, tweeters, musicians. This is a feature, not a bug. We form parasocial relationships with people we like, even if we don't know them personally. We're not in little primate social groups following a skilled leader anymore. We're millions, thinking that some jerk is somehow good because of their wealth. We think we know someone because of the constant drip of traditional and social medias, but they don't know you, we don't know them, and they're basically strangers. Our primate brain, though, doesn't have different lanes for parasocial and real relationships. As far as our brain is concerned, we know Beyonce, we're friends, and, you know, we're ride or die. So we will dismiss information we dislike and we will defend those friends, in public, in private, wherever. Fanboys think they are friends. They have vested personal time and resources into the support of a human, and that human or even brand has no idea who they are, but they benefit from these parasocial connections. Again, feature, not bug. I have a master's in this, and let me tell you, the super wealthy pay people to build these stories on their behalf constantly. So, how do you feel about Elon Musk? How do you feel about Oprah? How do you feel about the Waltons? Walmart. Less good? How about the 1% or elites? They are the same thing, but they don't elicit the same story in our heads. The stories are reinforced by the parasocial relationships, and then also cognitive dissonance. As an example, let's use somebody who's a little polarizing right now. Elon Musk first hit the scene a long time ago, decades ago. Young men, myself included, we told ourselves he was amazing. He was doing what NASA wouldn't. He wanted to smash that Boomer gas car culture. He wanted us to buy flamethrowers 'cause we could. When that happened, we wanted him to be this like Starkian hero genius, even if Musk is kind of an a-- Whoa, Primey, come on. Do you want the trolls banging down our door? Jeez. Just say this. "His public persona has made me reconsider ever supporting him or his efforts into the future." You're right, Buddy. I'm sorry. You're right. Cognitive dissonance makes it painful to see and hear it. At least he's not as terrible as Alison and Dave. You know what I'm saying? They're the worst. What the [beep], Primey? Everything they do is gold. You're talking about Alison Brie and Dave Franco, right? Yes. Okay, maybe I recognize I'm not literally friends with "Dalison." I know, but here you are, defending them. Why did you feel the need to do that? Oh, their public personas. I hate it when you're right. Oh, Primey. Okay, so when I said I love them, I should have probably said that I love their work and their public story. They're positive forces in my life. Bingo. Oh my God. Okay, my mind is fracking right now. I just, I, oh my gosh. This is classic cognitive dissonance. The brain is a physical thing, so regardless of where the narrative came from, if you've accepted it and you've start to run those neural pathways over and over again, they become harder to deconstruct, like a road in the mud. It gets more and more channels and it takes effort to remove them. Rihanna is a billionaire. Maybe we don't like billionaires, but we like Rihanna, and now I have to figure out how to--

♪ Work, work, work, work, work ♪

Buddy, we do not have license for that. Whoa. Are you trying to get us sued? So how do we square our love of Rihanna's work in spite of our dislike of billionaires? Do we become critical of Rihanna? Is it okay to be her fan? This conversation is hard, but it's important. Cognitive dissonance, parasocial relationships, and worship of the wealthy together create these armies of jerks who will defend strangers by attacking other strangers, even when the critiques might be legitimate. Fenty is cool. Do they release ethical statements about their company? Do you know? It's a conversation and we should be able to discuss it. I don't want to pick on her, by the way. Rihanna's amazing, but there are tons of billionaires. She's just famous enough that you would know who she is and she's less political right now. Replace her with any billionaire and try to be honest with yourself. It's just for the video. And, sure, it's easier to ignore or deflect and say, "I love this person and blah blah, blah," but deserved and talented are not mutually exclusive from lucky. And, speaking of luck, I literally lucked into making YouTube. I've been doing it 10 years now. Can you believe that? I use my own money to make these videos, and I am very much not a billionaire, so if you like them and you get anything out of them, or you want to support me in any way, the best thing you can do is join Nebula. Nebula is a creator-owned and built streaming service that I invest in and I'm a part of. If you watched this same video that you're watching now over there, I would get a little money from that. You'd be supporting me just by doing what you were gonna do anyway. Plus, there are no ads, and a bunch of other amazing things that only can exist there. We've got videos from over a hundred creators, so you can support a ton of humans by watching their videos. Plus, some creators release extra content on Nebula. For example, they might have a full episode ahead on Nebula from where they are on other platforms. They might have extra content in their videos called Nebula Plus, things we would cut out of the YouTube version to appease the Almighty algorithm, and, on top of that, we have Nebula classes, where you can learn how creators work, live, and think, and I actually filmed one where I explore how I formulate all my searches when I'm writing my videos so I make sure that I'm going around my own biases and trying to find true information. There's new content every day on Nebula, including our own originals that we spend months putting together, and they're super high production. Honestly, it's a lot and it's so fun, and if you're in, it's so easy to join, and, again, joining supports me directly. So just go to nebula.tv/tracedominguez and sign up. When you do it, it supports me. It's about $2.50 a month or $30 a year. It's the price of one coffee, and every view of every video supports me and any other creator who you watch. I have paid rent with my Nebula earnings, no joke, and I cannot say that about any other platform. Gracias, amigos. So it's not that we can't celebrate successes or admire people. Luck is important, but it's not end all, be all. Part of living in a healthy society is recognizing each other's awesome, but, statistically, a huge chunk of our society literally don't love billionaires. The Pew study I mentioned earlier found one in three people under 50 and one in two under 30 believe billionaires are bad for our country. So what does that mean for them long term? Once the bulk of the population realizes we don't actually like billionaires at all, what are we gonna do? As my brother said, anyone who's accumulated that amount of wealth, they've done some thangs, but we use these stories, either real or fake, to sort of put lipstick on that pig. The best inoculation of propaganda is critical thinking of understanding how billionaires got rich, with a bit of luck, why we think wealth is good or a skill, when it's not, and why it's hard for us to hear all of this stuff, cognitive dissonance. If you can break all of those things down and start to think about thinking about them, knowing why and how we feel anything for the super wealthy might help us look more critically at ourselves, and once we know why we think things, honestly, it's a little confusing, but it's like seeing the code of the Matrix, really. You start to see these things everywhere. So, now, when I see a news story about a wealthy person, I ask myself, "Is this news? Is this just because they're rich? Why should I care? I remind myself that this wealthy person is in that position not necessarily because they're talented, but they're also randomly lucky. That makes me feel good, because I can see them as lucky people, not mythical beings, and something that maybe you've already commented about is, if you're born wealthy, does that change this? Not really, if you think about their parents were also randomly lucky. In the end, y'all, I hope this changed a little bit about how you see the world. If you need somebody to look into the science, psychology, sociology, whatever behind something that you're curious about, that's my job, so let me know. I'd love to make a video that a viewer has told me to make. I read every comment. I get all my emails. I'm on Mastodon, Twitter, Instagram, wherever. So, thanks for watching, all y'all. I'm Trace, and I will see you in the future.