Alux: A Dystopian Self Help Channel

Hey everybody! Today we're going to be talking about the self-help financial advice lifestyle YouTube channel Alux.com. Sitting at over 3.5 million subscribers, Alux advertises itself as the place where future billionaires come to get inspired. Welcome to Alux.com, the place where future billionaires come to get inspired.

The first thing that caught my eye about Alux videos was how vaguely terrifying all of them are. The host of the channel speaks in this robotic, over-enthusiastic tone, and the videos consist only of stock footage, often stock footage of faceless people walking through crowded cities. The whole thing, frankly, makes me feel like I'm living in some kind of a fictional dystopia where a robot is about to inject me with lethal serum because I've become obsolete to my corporate overlords.

This is the Sunday motivational video. Every Sunday, we bring you a different type of video which should improve your life. Today, we're looking at 15 things poor people waste money on. But no, Alux is real in our world. It's all too real, and somehow the content of the channel is even more cursed and surreal than its aesthetic. Alux is, to its credit, one of the strangest YouTube channels I have ever come across in my life, and I'm excited to talk about it today.

Part one: hustle culture and the poor. So Alux has a vast library of videos with topics ranging from the lifestyles of the rich to the intricacies of simp culture. Hello, Aluxers! We have a juicy topic for you today. Buckle up, because this is gonna be a roller coaster ride as we unpack the facts about simping.

And that means two things: one, I can't get to all of it and didn't try. There are certainly tons of Alux videos that I have not seen. And two, they sometimes might say stuff that departs from what you'll see in this video. Nonetheless, I'm going to be talking about a lot of their videos today, focusing on one of their strangest and most popular topics—comparing the practices, attitudes, and behaviors of rich people to those of poor people. Stuff like 15 things poor people do that the rich don't, the 15 rules of poverty, and the 15 reasons staying poor is a choice. Delightful!

So if you take a step back from these videos and look at the bigger picture, the theme here is obvious and uncomplicated: poor people are in their social class because they have the wrong mindset and, to be frank, are just a bit stupid. To be sure, this is not a particularly odd theme for a bit of media to have; hating poor people is one of America's favorite traditions. But it is interesting to see just how on the nose Alux is about it.

Many of their suggestions are useless, cruel, petty, or just downright unhinged, and let's go through a fun list of these takes right now. One, they claim that poor people are simply lazy and that one of the main kinds of lazy poor people just hates work, loves welfare, and loves pumping out lottery babies they think will get them out of poverty. There are two types of laziness: one, people who despise work and would rather sit at home and collect welfare, pump out children so they can use them to keep themselves alive, and maybe one of the children will be their ticket out.

They give another definition of laziness later on, but let's focus on this one because it's rude and bad and also super weird, like especially that lottery baby point. They say that multiple times across their videography, and I never have any clue where they're getting it from.

There's something interesting we've seen in poor communities that we want to share with you; it's this concept of a lottery child. Basically, you make as many children as you can in the hopes that one of them will make it and will take care of everyone else. I've researched this topic a bit, and in none of the articles I've read did it ever indicate that poor people have more kids because they think one of them will strike it big. Just a strange, insulting thing to say about poor people.

Two, a common point for them is that poor people are entitled or just want handouts, claiming that unlike the fetid poor, rich people don't protest or boycott. The rich don't protest or boycott; they produce. The true rich got to where they are by creating value for others. That's the only recipe to riches.

So this point sucks because poor people should be more empowered in our society. They should be protesting and dangling some ridiculous prospect of them becoming extraordinarily rich so as to stifle class antagonism and the fight for workers' rights is demonic. Isn't this kind of putting the cart before the horse? You know, if you're a well-off person on the road to becoming a billionaire or whatever, of course you're not agitating for welfare or better conditions; you already have those things. You know, there's no need.

Three, in one of their videos, they say some of the strangest sentences I have ever heard, that in essence, the reason poor people are poor is that money flees the hands that don't work for it. Money flees the hands that don't work for it. Have you ever noticed how those who are bad with money can never seem to keep a hold of it? Even if fortune hits them in the face, it only takes a couple of years for them to get back to the place they started in. This is because money doesn't like people who don't work for money, so it flees to find new owners.

So this point amounts to a kind of surreal money mysticism, one that seeks quite obviously to justify the current distribution of wealth. You know, why do rich people owe more than you do? Well, it's because money seeks the hands that work for it, and you must not be working. What's even stranger than this point, though, is the argument they used to justify it, this weird spiel about UBI in Finland.

A recent study done on UBI, or universal basic income, done in Finland over two years where they gave people 1,000 euros, or 1,100 dollars every single month with no strings attached, has seen no real improvement in their ability to get their lives together. The only noticeable result is the money made them more happy, but nothing else. They didn't find a place to work, they didn't follow their passions, nothing to the effect of economical transformation.

You see, money solves money problems. Poverty isn't a money problem because the money you can give is always finite. So I have, and I count, four things to say to this point, and I'm gonna go through every single one of them. The pacing of this video be damned, I guess. Let's do a sub-list of the strange things about this take.

A, this video sucks. How does any of this demonstrate the point that money flees the hands that don't work for money? Is she saying that by virtue of the fact that they didn't work for UBI, the money fled their hands? Because I don't think she proved that one out. You know, it seems like they're gonna need to do more to demonstrate that point, because right now this entire thing looks like a random non-sequitur.

B, most people consider the Finland UBI experiment a success. You know, it's a bit complicated, but it seems people on UBI worked more, felt happier, and thought better of the government than did the control group. I don't know where they got the idea that nobody really got their lives together or followed their dreams, but I don't even think that's true.

Like, the propensity to follow dreams wasn't tested statistically, but they did conduct interviews with UBI recipients, and let me read you a passage of that here. For some, the experiment offered new opportunities of participating in society, for instance, through voluntary work or informal care. Many interviewees said that the basic income strengthened the feeling of autonomy. Kinda looks like they pursued their goals more. I don't know what they're talking about.

C, okay, this one may seem pedantic, but what are they talking about right here when they claim that's why poverty isn't a money problem? Because the amount you can give is always finite. Like, to be clear, I'm not totally against their conclusion. I think building up infrastructure and opportunity is a fine idea, but who cares if the amount of welfare you can give is finite? The planet is finite, humanity is finite, our basic needs and desires are finite. The finitude of the money we can give people is not, on the face of it, evidence that giving them that money is a poor policy decision.

Like, people who got UBI were less impoverished than the control group was. You can't unilaterally say that money doesn't solve poverty when that's quite literally something that happened in the very study you're talking about.

D, the Alux lady saying the UBI only made people happier, like that's a bad thing, is just—it's so funny to me. The only noticeable result is the money made them more happy, but nothing else? Like, even if she's right and that's all they got, that seems cool to me. I'm down for the happiness policy personally.

Anyway, that's all for the problems I had with this point. Let's get back to the larger main list of Alux talking points that I think are weird.

Four, I'm really fascinated by what Alux says about working-class people doing stuff that makes them look nice. Have you seen the nails and the haircuts on people who can't even afford to fix their cars? This is one of the most annoying things that we see that keeps people from becoming better.

You've worked your butt off the entire week, and then reward yourself with a new hairstyle that's going to fade away in two weeks to impress people who are not doing any better than yourself? Ever noticed how almost all rich people have the same simple haircut? Instead of throwing money out the window, start fixing your windows.

This is just so deeply off-putting to me. Like, so what? People enjoy doing stuff that makes them feel comfortable and happy. I understand they could be saving all that money, but as you just said, they were working hard all week. Why are we blaming them for taking some amount of pleasure in their lives?

No, you have to be like Mark Zuckerberg and buy 400 t-shirts and look shitty on purpose because he's a white rich guy and respect for him is the default. I don't know; the tone the Alux lady uses makes it seem like people are choosing between escaping poverty and getting their nails done, and I think that sucks, personally.

Five, this is kinda related. At one point, they claim that poor people just take out too many loans, like payday loans. And let's face it, they're using these loans to buy frivolous shit that they don't even need. What are you doing buying a TV on credit? Why are you ready to go into installment payments on the new PlayStation? Why are you borrowing money to buy a dress or a handbag? Just stop!

We know many people lack access to funding in case of emergencies, which is why they're taken advantage of by predatory, loan shark-like institutions. Believe it or not, these people borrow money from payday loan companies without understanding the contracts they're signing. They're paying 70 to 250 percent yearly interest on the money they're borrowing for stupid—this take is so deeply misplaced that I don't really know what to do with it.

They imply that these people are desperate, which is why they take out the loans, but that doesn't stop them from calling what these people are buying stupid shit. Look, again, I'm not denying that people sometimes go into debt for pleasure purchases, but that's just not the whole story of predatory debt—not even close.

A quick trip to Pew Research will reveal that in 2012, 69 percent of payday loans are taken to pay off recurring expenses: utilities, credit cards, bills, rent, food, etc. Sixteen percent go to emergencies, cars breaking down, medical problems. Most people who take out these loans can't afford not to do so. They need to cut back on life expenses like food and clothing; they need to delay paying bills, and they need to pawn their possessions.

Avoiding this basic fact, pretending that people have the option to only go into debt to make more money is absurd, and the reason they're saying it is that they hate poor people.

Six, okay, so in their video "Rules of Poverty," the Alux lady talks for a bit about the chains keeping people poor and how you must break them if you ever want to find success, and the chains they include are just so odd.

You need to free yourself of every chain keeping you in poverty if you want to escape it. The most common chains are family and a lack of parental guidance, education, infrastructure like basic utilities or access to financial instruments like a bank or market, geography, health, a lack of early employment opportunity, and addiction. As long as you still have one chain locked, there's no way for you to run toward the horizon.

Like you can't change these things about yourself, Alux. By the time you're 25, you can't make it so that you have early employment opportunities or a loving family, so why are you acting like people can free themselves of these chains? They can't! You can't! You must realize objectively they can't do that.

Seven, at one point, they say that making money is easier than spending it. The hard part is keeping the money, not making it. Making money is no secret—you get a job or sell a product or service; that's basically your only two options. But very few people know how to keep it and grow it once they have it.

How many of you are spending money you don't have? How far behind the line are you where you're doing the math in your head and hope the people you borrowed from will just forget about it? So obviously, this is a way of fetishizing the rich, right? Rich people are doing the super hard thing—keeping their money—whereas you, the poor, fall to temptation and buy stuff.

I don't know what to say to this besides that's not true. Keeping extra money that doesn't go toward living expenses is actually way easier than making it. I don't want to blow your mind, but poor people have less money than rich people do, and I think that's probably the biggest reason why they can't save it. But if they had more money, it would be easier for them to save it.

For most of us, the job would be the harder thing to do. Personally, that's true for me, and I think you'll find if you look into your own experiences that it's actually a lot easier for you too because the working part is the harder part for almost every person who lives.

Eight, okay, this list is getting old, so just one more thing. Sometimes Alux goes for this vague Ayn Rand energy and talks about how the rich are the real producers. Like in this video called "15 Things Rich People Do That the Poor Don't," they claim that all of the innovation of recent history has been performed by financiers who invested in progress. They're making the world a better place.

This is what the poor hate to be told, and it's probably the point on this list where we're going to get most of our hate from. Believe it or not, the bulk of all innovation in the history of mankind was financed by the wealthy. Everything around you and everything we know about the world today wouldn't exist without some rich person or group making a very risky bet.

I mostly wanted to bring this up because it feels relevant to their ethos, but there's not much of interest to say here. Yes, for much of human history, the commons have been privately owned by relatively few hands, and therefore anything produced with those commons using its resources can be taken as a win for the owning class. But isn't that kind of a shitty, low-effort, vacuous win?

Like, yeah, you got it. You own all the stuff, so we had to use it to make things, so it's kind of like you made all those things yourself and are the true innovator of history. I don't know. You know, we could talk about this a lot more, obviously, but we have to move on.

So there we have it. We have our big list of weird takes, and frankly, I do find it mind-blowing just in terms of how aggressive and bad it is. But at the same time, if we wanted to ask what is this media doing, I think the answer would be pretty forthcoming.

See, if you are in the audience for these videos—a working-class person who aspires to be a billionaire—you might go down these points and find something that affirms your choices and identity. You, unlike most poor people, don't spend a ton of money getting your nails done. You don't protest anything or have big demands. You don't think you're lazy, don't love getting welfare, don't take out lots of frivolous loans, and don't have lottery babies. You can look at the videos and say, "Yes, I am working class, but because I am not the average working class as described here, there is hope for me yet."

Better watch more Alux, better do what they say, and read the books they get money for.

Reading it is through this perverse logic that the more they demean poor people, the more they lie about them, the more a subset of that audience might identify with their work. I don't know; any of this mind you, I didn't conduct a survey of Alux videos. I'm just saying that from the outside, this seems like a reasonable way of understanding Alux's choices and how their videos might come off as appealing, engaging, or inspiring.

So, okay, I think this channel is a con and that they are manipulating people in some very pernicious ways, but we are just getting started! These videos get so much weirder, they just—it just gets so odd so fast.

Part two: a dystopia in relief.

So I was watching some of these videos about poor people and rich people when I stumbled upon this point. The hardest working person in the world likely lives in poverty. Wealth, or the lack of it, is a result of your ability to use the tools you have at your disposal. The problem arises when there isn't proper access to the tools required to escape poverty.

If hard work was all it took to be wealthy, the richest people in the world would be the children working in the cobalt mines to get you your iPhone. This is interesting, I think! I mean, what she says here is true, and it's not even particularly controversial. It's straightforwardly a myth of capitalism that hard work is rewarded in some absolute sense.

But the Alux lady isn't simply saying this fact. She is framing it as a fundamental injustice. First, she says very directly that no matter how hard people work, the problem is that they simply lack the tools to get out of poverty to magically make their labor more profitable. Then she includes this very visceral example: a child mining for cobalt.

It is impossible to hear this and not think, "Wow, that's pretty fucked up, isn't it?" I don't know if he should be rewarded because he works so hard or because he's literally a child, but in either case, capitalism clearly led us to a disturbing outcome. By all accounts, according to anybody's conscience, the kid should have more power than he does.

This is a bit of a theme on Alux—this language that seems to be consciously critiquing modern capitalism. Like Alux will talk about how poor people end up having to spend more money than the rich do in a lot of cases for a variety of reasons. Some of you might be wondering right now, "How come it's so expensive to be poor when being poor means you have no money?"

But look at it this way: you don't have money to fix a cavity, so you ignore it. The tooth gets compromised, and now you have to get an implant. The cavity fix was a couple of hundred; the implant is a couple of thousand. They even have an entire video dedicated to this one point, and isn't that kind of an accurate and powerful case to make that poor people not only make little but also have to spend more of it than the rich do?

Or they talk about Finland in a really positive way in one video: "We're looking at 15 reasons Finland is the happiest country." Finland minds the gap; the widening wage inequality gap is one of the leading reasons for unhappiness in many countries. Finland has fought against this type of inequality since Wananakiya Musi. It has always been a priority for the country.

Now, I'm not saying this is any kind of radical point they're making here, but doesn't it seem to affirm the goodness of redistribution, make a claim about how poor people should be treated, and implicitly criticize policies that enforce extreme wealth inequality?

Finally, we have another recurring idea on Alux: the claim that debt causes you to lose self-ownership, that it—and this is a verbatim quote—is the modern-day version of slavery. Think of it like this: if dollars were seen as freedom points, you'd look at the world differently. Most people in the U.S. end up in debt before they're old enough to drink. Most of them spend the rest of their lives trying to repay it. When the main focus of your existence is paying off the fruits of your labor to someone else, isn't that just another form of slavery?

Now, we could have a very long conversation about what that sentence means and what it means to Alux, but nevertheless, I think we can recognize that Alux is using some very loaded and kinda powerful language here. From their perspective, our culture of debt—the way capital actively profits from our failure to pay our bills—is by its nature authoritarian and freedom-destroying. It is a bad thing to no longer own yourself, and from their perspective, many Americans do not.

That's really interesting, isn't it? In the first part of this video, we went through a lengthy list of ways that Alux hates the poor, but how can that work now? Like, on a basic intuitive level, how can you say that the working class is lazy and unwilling to learn new skills, say that money flees hands that don't work for money, and then say working hard isn't rewarded and people in poverty don't have the tools to get out of it?

How can you say the poor take out so many frivolous loans—that's why they go into debt—and then say living as a poor person is just more expensive in a lot of intractable ways? How can you claim that money isn't the problem, that the poor ask for too many handouts? How can you criticize UBI and then celebrate one of the most robust welfare states in the world, the very country that tried that UBI program to a substantial degree of success?

How can you accept and endorse the absolute control the rich have over our society, call them innovators, and lavish them with praise, and then go on to talk about how they own us, how our debt makes us their slaves?

Well, I, for one, want to tell myself a nice story. Perhaps this is just the truth seeping in somehow. The channel spends so much of its time trashing the poor, presenting lies and misdirections about the way the world works, and maybe these points that criticize capitalism represent a reality that cannot be obscured entirely. As much as we might try to avoid it, at some point, you have to see that the poor aren't lazy or stupid, that working hard often does go unrewarded, that the rich take advantage of the working class's lack of power.

These truths sometimes just come out whether you like it or not.

So, okay, what do you think of that story? Do you think that's a good conclusion to this video, that it represents the truth about Alux? Well, unfortunately, I don't.

Here's one of Alux's most interesting takes about how media is the opiate of the masses. You might say, "But Alux, I'm watching The Big Bang Theory, which is a really funny show and it helps me disconnect." That's exactly the issue: you disconnect from your problems instead of dealing with them and getting them out of the way.

And this exact point is repeated when it comes to sports in another video. It's the same with television; it's escapism from your current reality. Now I don't really agree with this. What's the point of living if you can't enjoy yourself and have fun with art? I don't see time with media or sports as broadly wasted, and I would question the assumptions that go into that claim.

But if we do commit to this position as Alux does, it has an odd implication. See, in both the point about media and the point about sports, the lady says the same thing: you should only engage in these things if you are making them. If you own the team or own the channel, celebrity gossip and buzz offers no value to your life. It only serves the celebrities. Rich people aim to be on TV instead of watching it.

The truth is unless you're a professional athlete or an owner of one of the teams, there's really no reason for you to watch sports. And you look at that and think, "Ha! Why would you do a thing like that?" Why would you advise the production of media if all media does is stifle the working class and prevent their ascent?

You can see the same thing coming up when they talk about consumerism. "No, you don't need six phone cases, the funky socks, kitchen appliances you only used once, and the list goes on forever. You are well aware of what the essentials in your life are, the things you actually need; everything else is just marketed to you."

They are brainwashing you into thinking you need said product despite you only wanting it. Like they will castigate poor people for getting impulse purchases, yet in the same breath they'll describe what the rich are doing as brainwashing, lying to people in damaging ways so as to enrich themselves. In other words, to become rich, to be rich, you are directed specifically to produce harmful material for the poor.

But see, that's what they want. This is the problem with trying to find logical contradictions within the universe of Alux. It might look fun or interesting, but in the end, it obscures the obvious positions that the entire channel surrounds, and here they are:

One, being poor is bad, and for them that sentence is true in every way it could be read. Of course, it is bad in the material sense; poor people are worse off, don't have power or freedom to change their lives. But it is also bad in a psychological, moral, almost spiritual sense: poor people are lazy and stupid; they expect too many entitlements; they are frivolous; they subjugate themselves to the manipulation of the ruling class—it's debt, it's consumerism.

Perhaps more importantly, two, being rich is good. It is good materially; rich people are better off. But it is also good morally and spiritually. The rich are the producers and the innovators; they see the world as it is and change accordingly. They can exist at a higher level of consciousness, throwing off the shackles that society places on them.

The way society makes people fit is by crushing them into the empty hole it finds in the immediate vicinity of the individual. There are two selves within us: there is the true self, the one where if every door was open for us we would eventually become them, and then there's another identity dictated by what we think society wants us to be.

Wealth allows you to put distance between your reality and that pestering voice, and sure, the rich don't always treat the poor well. Wealth inequality might be a problem; poor people are not paid for their hard work. But none of this matters to Alux; all of it kind of makes sense from their perspective because, at the end of the day, the rich are good. They get to make the media, and the poor are bad. They get to consume it and be made docile.

The world of Alux is a hateful and misanthropic one, and your only hope is that someday, with their help, maybe you can own it.

Wow! Big Joel is an epic champion who always manages to leave me satisfied yet hungry for more. That is what literally every last one of you in my audience is saying right now, and it's why I'm excited to talk about the streaming service Nebula.

Every month, for the foreseeable future, I'll be releasing a little bonus video there. At this point, I think I have like five videos up; it's getting kind of stacked, honestly. But for example, I have one about Shane Dawson, one about a weird conspiracy theory I saw on Twitter, and in this one, I talk about a fun strange Alux point that I literally could not fit into this video: one million dollars per year isn't a lot of money.

These videos can be released to the public after a long time, usually like a year, but most of them probably won't be since they're not always algorithm-friendly or something I want to release on the main channel. I love making these little boys, and I hope you like them too.

It's shocking even to me how many frivolous hot takes I have inside of me. Where did I get this terrible power? The whole thing is pretty cool. With a subscription to Curiosity Stream, where you can watch great nature documentaries like this David Attenborough one about ants that I literally always bring up, you also get access to Nebula, where you get my videos early, those bonus ones, and access to tons of other stuff—work from Lindsay Ellis, Sarah Z, Tom Scott, and I can't even believe how much more! For 15 bucks, you get the whole thing for a year, so not too bad.

Anyhow, if you're interested, sign up at the link in the description: curiositystream.com/bigjoel.

So that's it. That's the end of the video. I hope you guys liked it. If you did, feel free to like, comment, subscribe, and give me money on Patreon if you want to—that would be cool. The patrons get all the bonus videos that I do for Nebula, so you don't have to worry about that.

And now it's time for my Patreon question of the video. Oscar Vivier asks, "Are you reading any books currently?" I'm reading three books right now. I'm reading a novel called "Earthlings," which is very fun but hard to get through, even though it's really short. I'm reading a book called "Practical Wisdom" about virtue ethics that was recommended to me by Sarah Z, no less. And most importantly, I'm reading "Crazy Rich Asians." I'm mostly reading "Crazy Rich Asians."

I am fascinated by the film "Crazy Rich Asians," and I can't put it down. I am obsessed with it.

Um, okay, bye! Thanks again for watching and everything. Have a nice day!