# Is the Middle Class Over- The Harsh Truth About Money, Work & Power in 2026

An episode of [Earn Your Leisure](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1450211392), 9 Feb 2026, 7:06.

Audio: https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/e73c998e-6e60-432f-8610-ae210140c5b1/8dbc4f54-a337-4481-9ef2-b355012b0a3d/def66e4c-bcc7-4c8a-81b3-b3ea00b2fdfa/audio.mp3?utm_source=Podcast&in_playlist=eac4c628-29cb-469a-b5c8-b355012b0a48

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## Transcript

[0:00] Speaker 1: Do you think Duvall posted this and I want to
[0:02] Speaker 1: ask you, do you think they killed off the middle
[0:04] Speaker 1: class in twenty twenty? Was the printing of that money
[0:09] Speaker 1: and COVID that way to destroy and widen that gap,
[0:12] Speaker 1: to erase the middle class?
[0:15] Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean the middle class I think has been
[0:18] Speaker 2: destroyed maybe before twenty twenty, but yeah, definitely not accelerated it.
[0:23] Speaker 2: I think that was definitely an acceleration of that. Even
[0:30] Speaker 2: going back to two thousand and eight financial crisis, and
[0:34] Speaker 2: we could talk about that on Blackout, but as far
[0:36] Speaker 2: as you know, how many people lost their homes in
[0:40] Speaker 2: that and that's when housing really became a forefront issue
[0:45] Speaker 2: and made a permanent class of renters. Collapsed, people's for
[0:50] Speaker 2: one cage, people panicked and sold. They have market Monday,
[0:54] Speaker 2: so a lot of people don't have the full education.
[0:56] Speaker 2: People got liquidated out of their positions. So I think
[1:01] Speaker 2: that was the start of it. The pandemic definitely probably
[1:06] Speaker 2: accelerated it with the amount of money that was printed.
[1:12] Speaker 2: But the middle class I think has been at least shrinking.
[1:17] Speaker 2: It has been shrinking, yeah, for the last twenty years
[1:21] Speaker 2: or so. And then you add inflation. That's the killer
[1:26] Speaker 2: because even when Epstein, that's what he said. That was
[1:28] Speaker 2: one of the things that he said. It was like paraphrasing,
[1:34] Speaker 2: he said that we we make money from trading stocks
[1:40] Speaker 2: and investing. It's not we're not doing real work. The
[1:44] Speaker 2: other people they got they gotta do real manual labor
[1:47] Speaker 2: for work. That's not that's not what we do. We don't.
[1:50] Speaker 2: We don't. We're not doing real which is ironic because
[1:54] Speaker 2: a lot of people were like, your content creators, you
[1:56] Speaker 2: guys aren't really contributing. He and he set several times
[1:59] Speaker 2: he was like Wall Street, what are they what are
[2:02] Speaker 2: they really doing? What are they doing? They're not doing anything.
[2:06] Speaker 2: They're making billions of dollars just by trading on aarbertrage concepts.
[2:11] Speaker 1: Yeah, price disparities.
[2:14] Speaker 2: They're not doing anything to contribute. They're not doing anything physically,
[2:18] Speaker 2: and they're not doing anything to really contribute to society.
[2:21] Speaker 2: They're not doing anything.
[2:23] Speaker 1: Especially when they deregulated derivatives and posts two before two
[2:27] Speaker 1: thousand and eight, it was a free for all.
[2:30] Speaker 2: But that's the world that we live in. That's the
[2:32] Speaker 2: I mean, you know, that's the that's the game that's
[2:34] Speaker 2: being played at the highest level. But the middle class
[2:38] Speaker 2: is not doing that. Put it like that, the middle
[2:40] Speaker 2: class is not taking part in that. In that situation
[2:43] Speaker 2: for the most part, they're still working for money. And
[2:47] Speaker 2: it's just getting to the point now between the creative economy,
[2:51] Speaker 2: Wall Street and AI. That's what Robin Vlaf said to us.
[2:56] Speaker 2: He's like, he's gonna get to a point the idea
[2:58] Speaker 2: of work is not even gonna it's going to it's
[3:02] Speaker 2: not even going to look the same in twenty years,
[3:05] Speaker 2: Like how we even conceive work. People that's actually still
[3:11] Speaker 2: trying to I mean, I guess you still got the
[3:13] Speaker 2: trade electricians and stuff like that, but the people that's
[3:16] Speaker 2: still trying to hold on to that we need more, No,
[3:18] Speaker 2: we really don't really don't need more. Really, I just to.
[3:22] Speaker 1: You, for every job loss, you only need ten in
[3:24] Speaker 1: video GPUs to replace the efficiency of an office worker.
[3:29] Speaker 1: That's scary as hell. And we were just at a video.
[3:32] Speaker 1: Trust me, for those who said, oh no, they can't
[3:35] Speaker 1: replace it. Some of the work that we saw in
[3:40] Speaker 1: those side conference rooms.
[3:42] Speaker 3: Yeah, but they got a garage for each unit, so
[3:46] Speaker 3: we saw all the time in this garage. But there's
[3:49] Speaker 3: a healthcare tector like yeah, happening like what are you
[3:53] Speaker 3: like in.
[3:54] Speaker 1: Another housing, it was hundreds of robots in the warehouse
[3:58] Speaker 1: that they're simulating. And this crazy part, even if we
[4:01] Speaker 1: make it to outer space or above Earth, they've calibrated
[4:07] Speaker 1: the AI to know the differences in gravity for the
[4:11] Speaker 1: robots to deliver goods and outer space. Yeah, that's scary.
[4:18] Speaker 1: Like they know the weight of Mars and Jupiter Earth too,
[4:22] Speaker 1: and it only takes a day or two for the
[4:25] Speaker 1: entire robot force to recalibrate to deliver supplies on other planets.
[4:30] Speaker 3: Yeah, the GPU that goes inside that that robot, Yeah,
[4:35] Speaker 3: it takes a day. If they know the level of
[4:37] Speaker 3: gravity on a specific place, they can train it to
[4:40] Speaker 3: balance itself inside that gravity. Right, So the first time
[4:43] Speaker 3: you train it, it falls to the ground. Then you train
[4:45] Speaker 3: it to Earth's gravity, it begins to learn how to
[4:47] Speaker 3: walk on Earth's But it's in the stuff you see,
[4:51] Speaker 3: it's just like, oh, it's not it's a different level,
[4:55] Speaker 3: different level.
[4:57] Speaker 1: And then of course Tesla, I mean you line announced
[5:00] Speaker 1: that SpaceX is merging with x AI.
[5:03] Speaker 2: Yo.
[5:04] Speaker 3: Yeah, talk about time.
[5:08] Speaker 2: Oh yeah, it's not the time to play follow the
[5:11] Speaker 2: money mm hmmm, follow the money. We do need more plumbers.
[5:16] Speaker 2: But everybody that's telling you we need more plumbers, they're
[5:18] Speaker 2: not a plumber. You ever think about that? That's a
[5:21] Speaker 2: good point. Gary V shot him. I mean he's a
[5:24] Speaker 2: genius obviously, but he's like, Yo, we need electricians. Gary
[5:26] Speaker 2: V is not electrician.
[5:28] Speaker 1: Mm hmmm.
[5:31] Speaker 4: Mm hmm.
[5:31] Speaker 3: Go get it over there. I'm gonna get it over there.
[5:35] Speaker 2: I hate, I hate to be a bad guy, but
[5:39] Speaker 2: let's just be honest. Everybody that told you you need
[5:41] Speaker 2: more plumbers, they're not plumbers.
[5:43] Speaker 1: Yeah, show me how you're making thirty shot to him
[5:45] Speaker 1: and Mike Boy all y'all love y'all. So if they
[5:47] Speaker 1: clicked this out, we love you, But show us how
[5:49] Speaker 1: to get thirty million off of the agency side. I'm
[5:53] Speaker 1: gonna go get it over there to hang draw all
[5:55] Speaker 1: good on. There's a bunch of people in tech and
[5:59] Speaker 1: VC saying that it's like bro y'all making seven and
[6:02] Speaker 1: eight million dollars off two three deals, so what and
[6:06] Speaker 1: it's good money and plumbing. But show them how to
[6:08] Speaker 1: make ten or fifteen million a year.
[6:10] Speaker 3: Yeah, that's good money there. That's good money there, ye for.
[6:13] Speaker 2: Sure, if you own a plumbing company. Yeah, let's be honest.
[6:17] Speaker 2: But what I'm saying, they tell you one thing, and
[6:22] Speaker 2: then they're not telling their children that they're not. They're
[6:26] Speaker 2: not sending their children to private school to become plumbers.
[6:29] Speaker 3: No, no, they want them to. Like I said, sometimes
[6:33] Speaker 3: in life, people earn money from the neck down and
[6:36] Speaker 3: some people earn money from the neck up.
[6:38] Speaker 2: Yo. Hey yo, I said. Earning money from the neck
[6:42] Speaker 2: up is wild.
[6:44] Speaker 4: Crazy, and that's going down people, I said, some people people. Hey, y'all, yo, people,
[6:54] Speaker 4: I don't maybe.
[6:54] Speaker 1: You know, I don't. I don't with them rates down, though,
[6:59] Speaker 1: appreciate getting that's it allegedly alleg maybe not

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