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 tons of parasites in you who are living off of you, and they 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 when 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 a piece 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 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. 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 had 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 14th France. I'd rather be a poor person today than an aristocrat back then, and that's just because of wealth creation—the engine of technologies, science that is applied for the purpose of creating abundance. So, I think fundamentally, everybody can be wealthy.

The thought experiment I want you to think through is: imagine if everybody had the knowledge of a good software engineer and a good hardware engineer. If you could go out there and you could build robots, and computers, and bridges, and program them. Let's say every human knew how to do that. What do you think society would look like in 20 years?

My guess is what would happen is we would build robots, machines, software, and hardware to do everything, and we would all be living in massive abundance. We would essentially be retired in the sense that none of us would have to work for any of the basics. We'd even have robotic nurses. We’d have machine-driven hospitals. We’d have self-driving cars. We’d have farms that are a hundred percent automated. We’d have clean energy.

So, at that point, we could use the technology breakthroughs to get everything that we wanted. And if anyone is still working at that point, they're working as a form of expressing their creativity. They're working because it's in them to contribute and to build and design things.

So, I don't think capitalism is evil. Capitalism is actually good. It's just that it gets hijacked. It gets hijacked by improper pricing of externalities. It gets hijacked by improper deals where you basically have corruption or you have monopolies...