Youtube Just Made Views Worthless | Hyper Viewflation

0:00In a wellorganized society, every YouTube video would have a trillion views. Everyone would be a trillionaire. Everyone would have limitless political power, limitless agency. Everyone would have Taylor Swift or Chairman Mao levels of constant fame, constant adoration. Every composer would be Mozart. Every footballer would be Messi. Every serial killer would be Luis Garavito. Everyone would have everything everyone wants. and the vanishing point of human desire would just ascend higher and higher into brighter and brighter realms of infinite and increasing bliss. Either that or real measurable value will bring everything crashing down into utter omnipresent worthlessness. This is a video about YouTube's update to their view count policy.

0:48[music] Solomon Smith. At the moment, I'm speaking into my sort of junk laptop microphone, but when this video begins, I'm going to start speaking into this super fancy microphone, and the increase in audio quality might be so extreme it just hurts your soul. Welcome to Solomon and Smith. I am Jack Truck and Ped. That is Milo Garner. Neither one of us is Solomon or Smith, but together we are Solomon and Smith. Welcome to the channel if you're new. There are many new people to our channel. Our channel is doing pretty well at the moment. The numbers are going up. All the numbers.

1:27We're really growing. This is also true of every single other channel on the platform and every single video on the platform. Everybody's just getting a lot of views recently. People are just watching much more YouTube than they used to. In fact, >> overnight overnight. On the same day YouTube did some like boring uh alteration to its view counting statistics, everyone just suddenly started watching much much more YouTube all over the world. I mean our numbers they're just they're just huge. Like the only way I can account for this is just a a huge interest on the part of the entire human race in the YouTube platform. This seems like a really amazing place to be an advertiser. That was my first thought seeing these enormous numbers. Like, wow. Advertisers must love this platform now. Every single video has quintilion views.

2:19That's insane. It's like all human attention, historic and present, is just being funneled into into the YouTube platform. These numbers are these numbers are amazing. I've never seen such numbers in my life. And it no numbers went that high. >> Yeah. And it's better. The bigger numbers are better. Let's all agree on that tacitly. We in the audience agree. You go on YouTube, you see some low numbers, you get a bad feeling in the stomach. You start feeling squirm.

2:46You wouldn't you don't want to go near it. You can smell a low number. Even if it's a high number. >> Yeah. Wow. Amazing. >> Remember when that that South Korean musician got to the highest number imaginable and we all crowded round our TVs waiting for the moment? remember this genuine cultural event when the number went up and we loved it. >> It was big and we have 10 fingers so every time it goes to another base 10 multiple it feels amazing. What numbers will be next? I mean eventually every every number on the entire YouTube platform will just be so high. The view counts will be so high. It will just be that it will be too big to fit on your screen. The views will just be you won't have enough digits in the universe to contain the amount of views to kind of 999 [laughter]

3:38the screen. >> Yeah. Yeah. In in two years every YouTube video will just 999 numbers too big for basic computers. We need to like up quantum computing. >> This is perfection to be able to >> This is what we want. [laughter] This is the ideal end state of YouTube is for every possible video has been made and they all have 999 quintilion trillion recurring. That's it. We can all log off after we get there. But we haven't done it yet, folks. [laughter]

4:08>> Refresh. Refresh. >> We'll need to create new attention having entities to keep these numbers going up forever cuz we all agree the number going up is a good thing. It's a beautiful thing. It's what the our entire society is based on. Every single number going up as high as possible. >> Infant mortality, [laughter] >> teenage pregnancy, [laughter] homicide. We want every statistic to be as high as possible. Even the statistics that cancel out other statistics, including YouTube views. So, of course, YouTube have changed the way they count views recently. In the past, it used to be that 30 seconds was a view. Now, a millisecond, a single frame of input, [laughter] a frame so abstract that it barely qualifies as input, barely qualifies as a quant of attention. That now counts as one attention currency marker, a view. You don't even need to click on a video anymore. If you're scrolling and you your mouse glides over a thumbnail and you see a single frame [laughter] of a video, that is now that is now you now have an attention quanta.

5:31When this um attention hyperinflation economy crashes, as it inevitably will, YouTube will inevitably introduce a new thing where every extra frame of the video you see counts as a separate view. After that, every time you click on the YouTube platform, every single video on that platform will get a view. Eventually in the future with sort of AI expanded brains thinking about YouTube, even thinking a thought that has to do with YouTube, like thinking about the color red, will give every single video on the platform of view.

6:06And creators like us here at Solomon and Smith will get these really pleasant endorphins of seeing every video we make being our most viewed video ever and having more views than atoms in the universe. This is the reason we started the channel and it we're getting closer. We're inching closer. I mean hopefully they'll devise a series of sort of AI viewing bots that they can release onto the platform that can view everything and then we can dispense with you our kind viewers and just have them, you know, writing all their automatic comments and then they can start making the videos. This is the real dream. And so we're getting infinite video creation of infinitely viewed videos over infinite time forever. Isn't that a beautiful world? Think about it. Isn't that a beautiful possibility?

6:53>> People always bring up the dead internet theory as like a dystopian thing, but what if this is paradise? What if >> we can do something else? We could go outside and mow the grass. >> We can lie around in the road. [laughter] >> Yeah, cuz >> we know the comments are being made and the likes are happening and the videos are being We know it's all they've settled it. We don't have to busy ourselves upkeeping this machine. >> And every single one of us is a massive influencer star with an infinite income buying products by advertisers who advertise using the influencer platforms. It's a loop economy that can just go on infinitely forever. We have the infinite growth, but we don't we don't go through all the pitfalls of infinite growth such as destroying the world. We just have this this infinite economy of gobbledegook, which is machines paying attention to machines in our name, creating an attention economy, making the number go up forever, which apparently is the only way we can sustain our our way of life. And everybody's happy. This is paradise.

8:02This is the way. And some of you snarky know-it-alls like it's not real. The advertisers will realize that the views don't matter. Economics is tied to actual needs and actual products. Well, how the hell do you explain the world, man? We can live in gobbledegook fantasy land. Let's just go for it. Even the gold standard was gobbledegook. What the hell do you do with gold? It's yellow. Okay, we can do things with gold now with computer chips, but we didn't used to be able to do things with gold. It's just shiny, weird brain firing. We don't need it.

8:45Just subjectivity. Just brainwash us or infinite machines into subjectively desiring a yellow metal, but an infinitely reproducible yellow metal. [laughter] The economy goes up forever. We have infinite money. Everybody's happy. >> Yeah. What's the problem? If the bigger number is better, then let's have the bigger number. YouTube used to say you got to watch it 30 seconds is a view. Watch 30 seconds. Our videos are about 7 hours a piece. 30 seconds. That's that in itself is insulting. 30 seconds. One frame is honest. 30 seconds is dishonest. A view is either everything or it's just the cintilla of a thought.

9:26And I'll take the cintilla. Happiness is the cintilla. If all men together agreed that 5 foot seven is six foot, do you think the world would be a happier place? [laughter] Would the world be a happier place? I think the answer is yes. Behold the Zimbabwean economy when every man had in his pocket $100 trillion. Was he a happier man? Be honest. He was. [laughter] He came home to his wife, "What have you got for me?" $500 trillion. Wow. Back in America, they bring home about 15.

10:00>> They only have one trillionaire in America. >> Zimbabwe is a land of trillionaires. Everyone, even your poorest vagrant, is in fact a trillionaire. >> Yeah. >> Wow. >> And the fact he doesn't have a jetpack just reflects badly on jetpacks. Trillionaires clearly don't need them. They're the ones living the trillionaire lifestyle. We should take notes. We should [laughter] we should have like, you know, diary of the CEO things written by all the Zimbabwean trillionaires telling us their secrets.

10:32Instead, we have this this deflation world that we live in. Okay, there's been constant inflation since the Second World War, but not nearly enough. I'm still not even a millionaire. That something's wrong. >> Hasn't happened yet. I like imagine if we just agreed the 100 m is in fact the 200 m. How fast would Usain Bolt be then if he did the 200 m in that exact same time? Why do we not? There's no It's It's made up anyway, right? 100 >> m a meter. It's an accurate standard.

11:05>> Just make 100 meters a mile. Then you've got you've got a a what? 9 mile. Who doesn't want that? >> Super cool. >> Come on. >> Yeah. just renamed the English Channel the Atlantic Ocean. Think of all these people who've swam the Atlantic Ocean. You know, name the people >> live in a world of dreams. What of wonders? And you you say no. What you want is 100 meters to be one meter. You want you saying B ran one meter in 9 seconds. That's pathetic. One meter in nine. That's what you want. You want $1 in your bank and that buys you a house.

11:44What are you talking about? $1 buys you a house. You want a one foot man to be three cm tall? Why? Why would anyone want a 3 cm tall dude around? That guy is gross and weird. Everybody hates these 3 cm tall guys. Infinite foot guy. Yeah, he's an empire state man walking around. We, you know, it's like the Cas monologue in in Julius Caesar. We like quiver under his feet. I was born free as Caesar. So are you. We both have fed as well, and we can both endure the winter's cold as well as he. My man, he dothride the narrow world like a colossus. And we petty men walk under his huge legs and peep about to find ourselves dishonorable graves.

12:36>> But Caesar is all men. Who doesn't want a world? >> And the pedant would say, the pedant would say that in fact all these things remain exactly the same. That all these things are unchanged by their labeling. This is the pedant saying call it 100, call it 200, call it one. Ultimately, these are labels to one unchanging phenomenon. But is that true? As Orlando Bloom says in Kingdom of Heaven, is not making a man a knight making him a better fighter. Is that not true?

13:05Doesn't making a man a KNIGHT MAKE HIM A BETTER FIGHTER? >> YEAH. >> Do we not have dignity, men? Do we not have dignity? [laughter] >> Yeah. People are like, "Ooh, if you're all buddy positivity and pretend that all women are hot, the hot women will still have this mysterious privilege over all the others." Yeah. >> [laughter] [laughter] >> Yeah. If every man's a trillionaire, a trillionaire is the same as a bum. Oh yeah. >> If everyone is super, no one is.

13:50>> I'll sell my inventions so that everyone can be superheroes. Everyone can be super. And when everyone's super, no one will be. >> Syndrome said that if no one is super, everyone is. That's Solomon and Smith. It goes both ways. >> It goes both ways. If everybody is equal, then the super people also get pushed down. That ain't cool. That ain't cool. That ain't cool. Do we want Elon Musk to be a bum like the rest of us? No. We want him to remain a king and for us to also be kings, sharing in his kinghood. And who cares if it doesn't match up with actual reality statistics?

14:30If you believe you're a king, I think that's pretty considerable. If you believe you're a king, if you believe that the last Solomon and Smith video got 15,000 views in 5 hours, if you believe that, God, it feels good. God, it feels good. >> Why you get you walk around with so many endorphins, everything feels amazing. There's a lot of people who feel like egalitarianism is a sort of a a lie created by those with no power to drag down those with power. And then there are those who claim that egalitarianism is a lie from those in power to sort of plate those without power. If they feel like they're equal to me, then they won't be so much bothered by the fact that they're obviously not equal to me.

15:18the Declaration of Independence, we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, written by a slave owner. And there's a sort of question in there of whether or not whether or not that very profession of egalitarianism, that profession of a a flattening of value, an equaling of value is just a cover story is just a sigh up to make you feel as the slave, as the unto mench, as the lower class, as if you are on a level with them, even though you're not. if you notice you're not on a level with them, you're more likely to be angry about it. That's a that's a theory. And it's kind of interesting because most of the resentment against egalitarianism comes from people with quite a lot of money, at least in the like a in like a public sphere. It comes from elites. Most of the time I hear people ranting about obviously human beings aren't equal.

16:18There are differentials in ability, in aptitude, in IQ, whatever metric you want to pick. These tend to be people who are kind of high up the hierarchy ladder. I don't hear it as much from people who are further down it. And I wonder whether egalitarianism, far from being some sort of grassroots resentiment lie to try and drag everybody down, is actually a way of pushing people down. Is actually a way of making people feel okay with having less than somebody else as much as them or just being o okay with that that hockey stick equality graph turning more and more into just two lines. You know, in the post-war era, it's gone from like a sort of swoopy wave thing to just blink one line, blink another line.

17:12Yeah, maybe the level of sort of egalitarianism, egalitarian talking points in day-to-day life correlates with a period where inequality seems to be increasing. You know, there's less and less equality with every passing day. And we're in an era that has seems like to be more egalitarian in its sort of philosophy, in its sort of propaganda language than ever before. Now maybe these things correlate because of the resentment of the people in the 99%. Or maybe egalitarianism is a very effective strategy on behalf of the 1% of making you kind of accept your lot. If you feel like you're equal to Mark Zuckerberg, you could be him one day. It's like the John Steinbeck thing.

18:03Americans don't have a working class. They only have temporarily embarrassed millionaires. >> Every bomb, every hobo in America is just this close from from becoming >> Mark. want to you don't want to drag Zuckerberg down by principles because you know that could be me and I'm not going to break down the walls that I'll be able to put up when I'm sitting in his chair. That would be very unwise because you know I'm I'm only give me a few weeks. All right. All right. I'm in the trailer park now. But he was too.

18:35Little Mark Zuckerberg. He was a little red hillbilly like me. He was running around with a piece of tubing. He was in a puddle. I remember that. I remember that kid. Who's that? Ma. That's Mark. You remember old Mark with like the with the corn coming out of his teeth, the little straw hat, >> the banjo he used to strum along and and then few weeks later he lives in this place called Silicon Valley >> and he's a it's a billionaire but here's a question.

19:03>> Does a high number serve as obfiscation by its highness? Is it true that when we say Elon Musk is a trillionaire, this number is so incomprehensible that we don't really feel bad about it in the way that Stalin said, you know, one death tragedy a million statistic. Is it true that we have now reached such numbers that no one can even comprehend the scale of the inequality and therefore it actually it doesn't just go a bit less annoyed. It just goes to complete neutral. What a millionaire, a billionaire and a trillionaire. I think in the brain that's kind of the same thing. We've gone past countable and we know billion is bigger than million. We know trillion is bigger than billion.

19:44But we don't really have like a brain space spatial understanding of just how colossal that is. And maybe this inflation of money has allowed people to just completely lose sight. Maybe if the, you know, the average man in the town has, let's say, he's got one pound to his name and that can buy him something. But then there's this one guy over there that has 10,000 pounds and we have a pretty clear understanding that this guy's 10,000 times richer. That's pretty huge. That feels massive. But if the the Zimbabwean comes to town, you know, in his sort of palatial carriage and such after converting the money and just sort of buys up most of the territory and he's got a hundred trillion dollars in a single note, we can't we can't even like what do you mean? What what it's just like nothing.

20:32It's just and so these people can exist in their parallel universe hidden by the high numbers in the same way that you know if a YouTube video has a few thousand views you kind of have a sense of how many you know in a room in a hall how many people have seen this thing and let's imagine if a YouTube view actually was you watch from the beginning to the end in full if it's not that it's a partial view doesn't count or you get like a quarter of a view it doesn't have to be in ones and then one view is the complete length beginning to end then you'd have a kind much smaller number, but you really know about the people who've seen the video. Alternatively, you've just got this infinite number, some of whom have seen the video, some flicked by it, some watched a bit of it, and and the quality and the content is obfiscated to our precious advertisers who we hope are not deceived unduly by YouTube's chicainery. We should let them know this is really an episode for the advertisers. [laughter] If you're not an advertiser, if you're not interested in the industry, not really for you. I'm, you know, this is for the [laughter]

21:31advertisers here. I think they might be taking you for a ride. I think they might really be using these insanely big number. I know it sounded great at the beginning of the video, but I'm starting to change my mind. I'm starting to think we're being inducted into a world of mirrors and that everything here is a confection made to fool us and we don't know what's real anymore. We don't know what a person is. What is one person? What is one monetary unit? if these things can just sort of fracture into infinite numbers the kinds of which we just never deal with in life we as people it's like when we were talking to um Kerwin Hampshire about mathematics and how it's very difficult to explain set theory to children in New Zealand because children in New Zealand don't often encounter uh sort of nested infinities they just it's just not something in the world but if Elon Musk has sort of ALF2 infinity funny. We just have to sort of deal with that as a people. And there's a great case of obfiscation in the real world. In the real world in which we live, which is in the movies, which like YouTube is

22:37currently a failing or fading industry. The numbers are going down in real terms. Ticket sales all-time lows. In each individual cinema, there's way fewer seats. Now, there used to be se cinemas of 2,000 seats that would fill up. That is no longer >> cultural cache as well. I mean, >> exactly. But how have they covered this up? How do we we we walk around we think yes cinema's doing well Avengers Endgame was that not the biggest grossing film of all time we're still going up Avatar 1 Avatar 2 they make billions but then if you compare this if you adjust for inflation then what you get is a very different picture Jaws number seven 1975 the Ten Commandments number six 1956 Titanic the most recentish 1997 and you got ET 1982 Sound of Music 1965, episode 4, Star Wars: New Hope 77. And number one, Gone with the Wind, 1939.

23:32Cinema is over. And yet, the movies are making bigger numbers of money than they ever did in the past. >> And so this inflation of money that they refuse to adjust for creates the illusion of a constantly growing industry that you, our fine and humble advertisers, keep falling for. The It's gone advertisers. The money is gone. You've got to start investing in I don't know. What do the advertisers invest in now? Tik Tok's not real. >> Zinc. Zinc. >> Zinc.

24:03>> Get it in zinc before it's too late. INVEST EVERYTHING IN ZINC. >> ZINC. >> YEAH. >> And how would we feel as a people if suddenly we decided all to be sensible and start adjusting? What would it feel like if actually they gave you the new sort of Avengers money but in its true value? And we have an example of this. We have an example. In various video games, there's this thing called stat squish, and we can use World of Warcraft [laughter] as an example. So, it gets to the point where they give you more and more powerful items. And in the end, you're doing millions of damage of HP, health points per hit. And it's amazing.

24:39Look at this. One hit, the number fills the screen. And that's one. You You're doing this consecutively. You have about 500 million health. Everything is beautiful. But then the developers, who we might term as God, realizes this has gotten a little bit silly. And so for an expansion or a patch, they suddenly set everything back. There was an example 2013 in World of Warcraft. If your character had 500,000 health, you woke up the next morning after the patch, they suddenly had 3,000. That's a huge decrease. You wake up 30,000 after 500,000. It's exactly the same in terms of percentages, in terms of how much damage you take or give, the same. But you feel weak. You feel like a dweeb.

25:19You feel like your wand has sort of become flaccid and you're just flapping it, doing equal amounts of damage to the equal enemies. Nothing has changed except the number. And yet you feel as though you have been castrated. You feel pathetic and sad. You feel like a man on the street beaten by hoodlams every evening. You feel like a man whose wife is free among the towns folk. You're known as the man with the free wife with your flaccid wand doing these piltry thousands of damage. Yesterday I did millions, you tell the people. And the people say, "Ah, yes, that old tale. I'm off to see your wife." And you weep. And you weep. Why? Because the number went lower. And yet they've done it multiple times because the god at Blizzard in World of Warcraft understands better than our own god that we can't chase this illusurary number forever. We eventually have to call it quits. The next Avengers did not beat The Sound of Music. We have to look it in the face.

26:15We have to be Zimbabweans or we have to be Englishmen. >> It's really hard to come to terms with decline. It's really hard to come to terms psychologically with things going downhill. My parents were like able to buy a house even though all my stats are higher. Even though my World of Warcraft but in real life stats are higher than my parents, I seem to be able to sort of do a lot less of the important things. It feels wrong to say that. It feels sort of melancholy. It's an uncomfortable. It's an awkward feeling to know you're part of something that's declining. To feel like you're part of something that's going downhill, that the number is actually getting smaller.

26:58the real sort of spiritual platonic form number that's invisible above you as your numbers here on earth go up and up and up. There's a tragedy to that. A huge aspect of economics is just dependent on these strange almost arbitrary facts of human psychology. The high numbers do feel better. You know, you can measure hyperinflation or or any kind of inflation quite reliably in in an economic system. If you print more money, inflation. But the reason that that happens, like one degree removed, one degree lesser abstraction is just to do with the way human beings ascribe value to things, which isn't necessarily objective. All human value isn't necessarily about drinking water and temperature regulated rooms and having a roof over your head and having enough healthy stuff to eat. It's all these really strange, hard to quantify things like feeling listened to, feeling needed, feeling wanted, loving and being loved, being entertained, being fascinated with something, an interest in knowledge, an interest in betterment, spirituality, the feeling of transcendent value. All of which you can't really put a number

28:22on. But we're living in a system where those things do sort of acrue numbers. Those things do have numbers attached to them. Attention is a great one in YouTube. Even if someone clicks on a video and watches it through the end, you don't really know how much of it's going in or what the ideal viewer, the ideal attentive viewer is actually getting out of something and what the value of that is. I mean, all the social media platforms are kind of advertising companies. They make their money advertising things to us, selling our attention. And the concept of attention, attention's so hard to put a number to.

29:00It's such a difficult thing to actually quantify. And when you're building an economy based on something that isn't married to any objective fact or need or innate biological desire, it's so hard to prevent these insane fluctuations to prevent plus infinity and minus infinity. But and it's interesting that even within this scope and even though we do all admire the Zimbabwe and trillionaires while they existed, I believe they've now switched to a currency either based on or just borrowing the US dollar. But it's interesting to think why that is because there does seem despite this proclivity to the highest possible numbers some little voice in the head that almost arbitrarily decides at some point a number is too high that a number is ridiculous that there is some kind of limit where it's gotten out of control and that we have to bring it down to a more acceptable level. And it's interesting to consider the opposite.

30:01And we have this in various stories. Mark Twain wrote a story. There's a Gilbert and Sullivan opera called The Gondelers in which all men are made aristocrats. They're all made nobles and and the characters discover that this doesn't actually solve the problems of inequality in their societies. There's a sense that just giving everyone the highest number intuitively. We know that's not really how it works. Even though it can have some practical change, even though giving someone something worthwhile, even if it's the same as everything else, can give you a certain oo that was an endorphin boost.

30:34There's also the notion that people feel that the viewers who are not advertisers who are clinging on to this video foolishly without hope are feeling in their breasts that there is a meaning beneath it and that the number can completely misconr construe it in the same way that the number can at least attempt to construe it and that there is a reasonable limit. There's a reasonable range and perhaps this is as we were saying before something about the human ability to deal with numbers of certain sizes. Perhaps this is some kind of relativity between number and reality that we feel inside of us. But much of the uh coverage of this YouTube hyperinflation that you'll see along the platform in the next few weeks is for the most part negative. It's not jubilation as we have previously expressed in this same video, but rather a kind of a a misery that what was more true is becoming more false. that the gap between reality on YouTube and just fantasm, insane numbers going up, robots watching videos made by robots is increasing. That somehow, I mean, one could really argue the original setting,

31:43the 30 secondond setting, is also very far from reality, that it creates a picture that does not really reflect how many people truly watch these videos, how many people truly embibe any of their content. But equally, I think we all seem to agree as a people that the 30-cond rule is a lot better than the one frame, one millisecond, one kind of flick of the eye rule there. It's not completely arbitrary. Or maybe it is, but we've all held hands and agreed there's a level of arbitrariness that we are all comfortable with and a level that seems to be designed for the machine world fast oncoming. There was a period in I I think early in in Xi's reign in in China where all members of the CCP were required to watch Xi's address to them. I think it was once a week and they have to load the video on their phones and let it play till the end. And apparently, you know, most CCP people, cuz you know, the Communist Party is faking enormous, you just put it in a room. You you let the video play, you put it in the next room. And I think there was talk of introducing like an eyetracking technology to make sure

32:54that people are actually sat at their phones watching the Xi speech. But then it occurs to me like even if there's an eye tracker technology, their minds could easily be wandering elsewhere while they're watching it. And then you can imagine like a mind tracking technology that checks that they are attending to each sentence. But even then, if they are attending to each sentence, you can't guarantee they're attending to it in the right way, in the way that Xi necessarily wants them to attend to it. Maybe you can attend to it in a really kind of flippant way. I can listen to every word that somebody is saying, but not really be taking it on board or kind of subtly dismissing it the entire time. And even if we had like sufficient sort of neurological surveillance really get into these minutiai of fine distinctions on how exactly we attend to something ultimately there's always just a level of attention that I feel will remain inaccessible or at least inaccessible on a broad enough stream. And the actual act of attending to something, the actual act of of viewing something, of partaking in the attention economy as a

34:05consumer is going to remain fundamentally mysterious. And the way it's quantifiable at the moment on the sort of bottom line is whether or not advertisers see their money number going up. But if we're thinking about attention in a more kind of broad way, a more sort of uh zoomed out way, there are just so many different ways of attending to things. Most of which I feel that really get deep into us are unquantifiable. They're just we're dealing with qualia. We're dealing with very specific innate unique experiences.

34:38>> Has anyone ever watched a YouTube video? This could be the leading question. Has anyone ever watched a YouTube video? Yeah. Looked at it. They've thought about it. But have you ever actually have there been a single view on any Solomon and Smith video? be honest. [laughter] >> Yeah. Actual attention. The kind of attention you would [laughter] This is it. The kind of attention you would give to your first child being born. You know, the actual real attention.

35:11Have you ever Have you ever given that to us? Of course not. And you shouldn't. You should treat us like Xi Jinping. You should put us on. Keep our number going up. Put watch your wife giving birth and go watch your wife giving birth in the next room, you [ __ ] [clears throat] >> Put on the Solomon and Smith video. Of course, you need the press, you know, put it up, you know. [laughter] Uh, watch till the end. Like, we the stats are nice. And like this video, comment, please subscribe to the channel if you [laughter]

35:43if you haven't already. But your wife is giving birth in the next room >> right now. >> It's literally happening. [laughter] >> I know you got a big advertising firm you're working with, but uh it can wait, buddy. It can wait >> five minutes and it's out. >> I'm going to read something about how we ascribe value, how we create value, what value means to us, where we extract our concept of value. For the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. After agreeing with the laborers for a dinarius a day, he sent them into his vineyard. And going out about the third hour, he saw others standing idle in the marketplace. And to them he said, "You go into the vineyard too, and whatever is right, I will give you." So they went, going out again about the sixth hour and the 9th hour he did the same.

36:39And about the 11th hour, he went out and found others standing. And he said to them, "Why do you stand here idle all day?" They said to him, "Because no one has hired us." He said to them, "You go into the vineyard, too." And when evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his foremen, "Call the laborers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last up to the first." And when those hired about the 11th hour came, each of them received a dinarius. Now when those hired first came, they thought they would receive more. But each of them also received a dinarius.

37:13And on receiving it, they grumbled at the master of the house, saying, "These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us, who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat." But he replied to one of them, "Friend, I am doing you no wrong. Do you not agree with me for a dinarius? Take what belongs to you and go. I choose to give to this last worker as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me or do you begrudge my generosity? So the last will be first and the first last.

37:51Just saw this on Reddit. Thought it was relevant. I don't know where it's from. Yeah. But perhaps in some other realm, in some Eonian realm, some cosmic realm, some upper realm of real value. Maybe there are real values out there. There are genuine positives, genuine negatives. Maybe they're maybe they're monetary, maybe they're moral, maybe they're to do with the amount of candles you have lit. But whatever they are, they don't really map on to our standards of value. You know, some people work an hour, some people work 12 hours. They both end up with the same thing, death. No matter what job you do, no matter what you earn, you earn the wage of death.

38:38>> Unless you are Peter Teal, in which case, >> yeah, Peter Teal aside, but you know, we apologize to Mr. Teal and please sponsor us. Please, please. We'll say anything. Peter, please. >> Come on. >> Um, >> ignore that, guys. >> Ignore that. Yeah, we'll forget you saw that except one particular viewer. [laughter] >> But yeah, there are our justice, our morality, our this thing better than this thing. this thing worth more than this thing probably doesn't map onto the other side of this this facade we call reality.

39:19>> Yeah. And we we see it within the facade when you know when we went to Polynesia and we saw they were trading with precious feathers and beads and said to these fools these are worth nothing. Look at this shiny coin I've brought. This is worth everything. This beautiful feather is from a bird. What do you mean this is worthwhile? Look at this silver spoon. Now, this is clearly objective value. >> Yeah, there's the great bit in Thomas Moore's Utopia where someone tries to introduce gold to the utopians and they do not understand that it has any value whatsoever. We can't do anything with this. We can't eat it. Mainly eat it.

40:03[laughter] We can't eat it. What the hell is the point? Carrots. >> Hang on a minute. >> But yeah, value is is maybe some aspects of it will always remain incomprehensible to us will have nothing to do with our numbers down here. Maybe we feel it. We ha you have the impression that your newborn child you're holding with your arms that you're having eye contact with that you're seeing yourself in that you're sort of >> while Solomon and Smith plays in the next room while you're looking into the cosmos you know staring back at you through the eyes of your newborn child. You sort of have the impression that that might be worth a little bit more than a chocolate bar. But >> but you're never sure.

40:50>> But you're never sure. and the the um and that these intuitions we don't know which ones are being fed to us from the the underworld and which ones are being fed to us from the overworld. I kind of like to believe in angelic value, but I also believe there is probably something fundamentally unknowable about it. This is becoming an annoying cliche of this channel that things are unknowable, [laughter] you know. Yes, I believe in >> I believe in the free market but it is fundamentally unknowable. I believe in progressive taxation but its fundamental nature and structure is fundamentally unknowable to me.

41:36>> Cannot be accessed by the human mind which is beyond the human mind. We can get around it sort of silhouette in the universe but alas we have no direct access to this profound concept. >> Yeah. The value of of footballers legs or you know basketball players arms and whatever hand eye coordination lobes of the of the preffrontal cortex are not necessarily connected to the angelic realms. But maybe they are to an extent. I like heaven being organized on footballing ability. Not football stats ability, not number of goals scored, but like the the beauty of the play.

42:22Ronaldo, best player ever, just cuz he's the most fun to watch. I know his stats aren't very high, but God knows. He knows and therefore the best human [laughter] has ever lived. >> It'd be weird. >> We get up there and it's actually it's YouTube view count. That was the angelic number. >> No, >> come on guys. Click, click. Get us up there. We need it. We need it. >> Solomon and Smith are finally deciding something. And that thing is that the YouTube view count is the angelic number that gets you to the highest seat in the hierarchy of heaven. This is a fact.

42:57This is not a we don't know what we we know this. It is the angelic figure. Please help us get to the next realm in a relatively comfortable position. And I'd be good with the third or fourth ring of the celestial heaven. I know Jack's aiming for five. Patreon. Patreon will get us to number four. Three views on this video. Five. Send us a large wad of cash. Zimbabwean dollars direct to our home addresses. We'll we'll paste those in the comments and and elsewhere on the internet as well as some [laughter] uh interesting data about our personal lives. [laughter]

43:38What a what a crazy video. Do you think egalitarianism [laughter] comes from Christianity? We'll just throw that question in there in the end. Do we think like the the sort of Chinese style of egalitarianism sort of coming sort of via Marxism, it's the same kind of thing? Or is our egalitarianism in the former Christian countries got a sort flavor to it? Because we have this workers in the vineyard. Last shall be first. the least among you is the greatest among you. Come to the kingdom of heaven as a little child or you won't enter it at all. Rich men can't enter it. Kind of reversing of of hierarchy, egalitarianism. Is that is that just more thoroughly there in Christianity?

44:22All the numbers being leveled, there being no stats based, you know, everybody's nerfed slash everybody's given infinite damage points. Is this >> the scripture? >> Yeah. Is the Christian worldview tapping into something objective in this? Are we genuinely worth an infinite amount? Is everything >> cope? Is this Christian? Yeah. Or is this Christian cope? Is it the resentment thing? Or is it cope for there not being a universal value? Or does every moat of dust have infinite value? Does every leaf in the Amazon have infinite value? Does every raindrop dew drop on the whisker of a mouse have infinite value?

45:12The answer is yes. >> YES.