Make Abundance for the World

Yeah, I think there's this notion that making money is evil, right? It's like rooted all the way back down to "money's the root of all evil." People think that the bankers steal our money, and you know, it's somewhat true in that in a lot of the world there's a lot of theft going on all the time. The history of the world, in some sense, is this predator-prey relationship between makers and takers.

There are people who go out and create things and build things and work hard on things, and then there are people who come along and plead with a sword or a gun or taxes or crony capitalism or communism or what have you. There are all these different methods to steal. Even in nature, there are more parasites than there are non-parasitical organisms. You have a ton of parasites in you who are living off of you, and the better, whether symbiotic and giving something back, but there are a lot that are just taking. That's just the nature of how any complex system is built.

But what I am basically focused on is true wealth creation. It's not about taking money; it's not about taking something from somebody else, but it's about creating abundance. Obviously, there's not a finite number of jobs or a finite amount of wealth; otherwise, we would still be sitting around in caves figuring out how to divide pieces of firewood and, you know, the occasional dead deer.

So most of the wealth and civilization—in fact, not most; basically all of it—has been created, and it got created from somewhere. It got created from people, it got created from technology, critical productivity, and it got created from hard work. So this idea that it’s stolen is, I think, this horrible zero-sum game that people who are trying to gain status play.

But the reality is everyone can be rich, and we can see that by seeing that in the first world, everyone is basically richer than almost anyone who was alive 200 years ago. 200 years ago, nobody had any biotics, nobody had cars, nobody had electricity, nobody had the iPhone. So all of these things are inventions that have made us wealthier as a species.

Today, I would rather be a poor person in a first-world country than be a rich person in Louis