The Last Scarce Asset: Access to Minds That Change Your Own (#205) — Transcript
THE PICTURE OF WEALTH · EPISODE 205
A speculative journey into a future where intelligence is abundant and access to the right minds becomes scarce. Dustin Serviss asks how the people around us shape what we believe is possible.
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This transcript was generated from the episode audio and lightly edited for readability. It may contain transcription or speaker-attribution errors. Refer to the recording for exact wording.
Transcript
[00:00:00] Dustin Serviss: If you came here looking for three practical steps to make a better business decision, this episode may disappoint you. Instead, I wanna take you somewhere stranger because sometimes the best way to see your business, your family, or the next big decision in front of you is to step completely outside the world you're standing in. So for the next few minutes, forget what's practical. Enter the story and see what follows you back out. In twenty one eighty nine, nobody particularly cared how much money you had. This was inconvenient for several billionaires. Money hadn't disappeared. It was still useful for small things, landing permits, rare whiskey,
[00:00:52] Dustin Serviss: certain varieties of illegal, cheerful house plants. But most civilization had become extraordinarily good at producing things. Energy was effectively unlimited. Food could be assembled molecule by molecule. Buildings printed themselves. An artificial intelligence could design a company, negotiate its financing, manufacture its product, advertise it, answer the customer complaints, and restructure the debt before lunch. Knowledge became so abundant that possessing it was completely, or I should say, considered slightly embarrassing. It was like bragging that you owned oxygen. And so humanity encountered a problem it hadn't anticipated. For thousands of years, we'd organized ourselves around scarcity, land,
[00:01:38] Dustin Serviss: gold, oil, capital, information, talent. Then, one by one, we solved them, and discovered another, people. Not ordinary people. There were plenty of those. The scarce ones were called uncomputed humans. Nobody knows who invented the term, probably somebody trying to raise a fund. An uncomputed human was someone the machines couldn't really predict, not because they were irrational, quite the opposite. They seem to possess an annoying combination of judgment, curiosity, instinct, and occasional bad manners that caused them to make bad decisions no model had assigned sufficient probability to. They started companies and industries everyone had abandoned, sold
[00:02:24] Dustin Serviss: businesses at precisely the wrong moment, and somehow turned out to be right, asked questions that caused entire boards to go silent. They could look at twelve pieces of perfectly good information and decide that the thirteenth piece, which didn't even exist, mattered more. There weren't many, and everybody wanted to be around them. So naturally, someone created an exchange. The Proximity Exchange opened in Geneva twenty one seventy four. Its ticker symbol was NEAR, n e a r. Membership was measured in kilometers. For forty million credits, you could purchase tier four proximity to an uncomputed human. That meant you weren't statistically likely to occupy the same metropolitan
[00:03:08] Dustin Serviss: region. Tier three, you put yourself within six kilometers. Tier two, gave you restaurant level proximity. And tier one, the most expensive asset class on Earth, gave you repeated, unscripted human contact. Dinner, walks, arguments, projects, unplanned conversation. The prospectus contained a warning, proximity does not guarantee relationship. Investors ignored this. Investors had been ignoring prospectus for several centuries. One of the largest buyers was a man named Eli Vale. Vale had built planetary infrastructure, not figuratively, actual planets. His company had learned to stabilize atmospheres on worlds previously considered uninhabitable.
[00:03:57] Dustin Serviss: At sixty three, his personal balance sheet included seventeen moons, two asteroid belts, and a controlling position in the weather over Northern Mars. He had totally won. By any reasonable historical measurement, Eli Vail had won by an absurd margin. But Vail had become bothered by something. His predictions were getting better. Every year, his systems became more accurate. Every acquisition behaved approximately as expected. Every meeting produced approximately the expected outcome. Every person he encountered wanted approximately the things his models predicted they would want. Nothing surprised him anymore. And without quite realizing it, Eli Vale had become bored,
[00:04:43] Dustin Serviss: so he bought proximity, a lot of it. There was an uncomputed human in particular, Mara then. She owned almost nothing. She had never founded a billion credit company. She had no political office. Her published works consisted of three essays, one unfinished book, and a handwritten diagram describing why civilization kept solving the wrong problems. And nobody even understood the diagram. It sold for eleven million credits. Mara lived on a tiny island in what used to be the Pacific Ocean. Vale purchased the closest available property. Technically, it wasn't property. It was a basalt formation sticking out of the sea approximately one point eight kilometers from Maras Island.
[00:05:30] Dustin Serviss: The brochure called an estate. The photographs were taken at low tide. Vale built a house there. For six months, he watched Mara's Island through enormous windows. He attended every approved gathering. He purchased the restaurant allocations, the walking allocations, the orbital coincidence package. His proximity score reached ninety eight point seven, one of the highest ever recorded, and yet Mara barely spoke to him. Finally, Vale became furious. He requested a meeting with the exchange. A representative appeared in his house as a hologram. She was dressed in traditional uniform of financial institutions everywhere, expensive fabric design, to suggest that nothing unusual was happening.
[00:06:13] Dustin Serviss: Vale pointed towards Mara's Island. I have purchased the highest proximity classification available. Yes. I am physically closer to Mara Venn than almost anyone alive. Yes. She doesn't invite me to anything. This is also correct. Vail stared at her. So what exactly have I bought? The representative looked confused. Distance. Vale canceled the hologram. That evening, a storm arrived. Storms were supposed to not happen anymore. They'd almost been completely regulated. This one hadn't apparently completed all the paperwork. The power failed. Vale's house went dark. The predictive systems shut down. His communications disappeared. Even the glass stopped displaying information.
[00:06:54] Dustin Serviss: For perhaps the first time in forty years, Eli Vale didn't know what was going to happen next. There was a knock at the door. Mara Venn stood outside, soaked, holding a bottle of something brown. Your house looks ridiculous in a storm, she said. Vale invited her inside. They sat on the floor because the furniture required electricity. Three hours, they talked. No agenda, no recording, no assistance, no optimization. Vale told her about the planets. She seemed moderately interested. He told her about his companies, less interested. He told her about the proximity exchange. She laughed for so long, he became annoyed. Eventually, he asked, what's so funny?
[00:07:38] Dustin Serviss: Mara looked at him. You people spent three centuries accumulating enough money to control everything around you. Vale waited. And then you discovered the most valuable things don't behave properly when controlled. Outside, something enormous crashed into the sea. Neither of them bothered to investigate. Vale poured another drink. Then why is proximity so valuable? Mara thought for a moment. It isn't. Vale frowned. The exchange is worth twelve trillion credits. Oh, proximity matters enormously? She pointed toward the ocean. But that's not what you're buying. Then what am I supposed to buy? Nothing. Vale stared at her. This was not an answer he encountered frequently.
[00:08:22] Dustin Serviss: Mara continued. You can buy the seat beside the interesting person. You can buy the neighborhood. You can buy the conference. You can buy the island next door. You can even buy enough influence to make important people return your messages. But eventually, somebody has to decide they actually want you in the room. Vale became quiet. The storm passed sometime before the morning. The systems restarted, markets reopened, satellites resume predicting things, and civilization went back to knowing approximately what would happen next. But Eli Vale did something unexpected. He sold the basalt estate, then several moons, then most of the weather. Nobody understood why.
[00:09:01] Dustin Serviss: His advisors produced fourteen theories. All were wrong. Over the next decade, Vale became famous for something entirely different. He started constructing tables. Actual tables. Long ones. Usually, in unusual places. Hangars, factories, mountains, ships, occasionally the middle of nowhere. And he became extremely particular about who sat around them. Engineer beside artist. Owners beside scientist. Twenty five year olds beside people who had already made every mistake available. Competitors. Investors. People he disagreed with, people who made him feel uncomfortable, people who knew something he didn't. No tickets were sold. There were no membership levels, no proximity scores, and strangely,
[00:09:49] Dustin Serviss: the people kept coming. After Vale died, economists spent years calculating the value of the company's discoveries and relationships that emerged from those tables. Eventually, they stopped. The number had become meaningless. Today, one of those original tables sits inside the Museum of Economic History. There's a small plaque beneath it. Most visitors walk past. It reads, the last scarce asset was never information. It was never capital. It wasn't even time. It was access to the minds that changed your own. And underneath, somebody has scratched another sentence into the metal. Nobody knows who wrote it. It says, choose your orbit carefully.