Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Our understanding of wealth and what wealth is, is flawed. To me, wealth is nothing but storage of energy. And therefore the reason wealth is not zero sum is because energy is, and we are just finding ways to convert energy to our advantage. We are the only species that has managed to convert all forms of energy to our advantage. Kinetic energy and fuel and sound and solar. No other species has done this. And therefore, since the industrial revolution, our wealth has gone like this and continues to be like that. AI and nuclear fission and all this stuff will kind of take us right there. So I have a strong view that we will never, never have equality of wealth. In fact, chasing that is actually a bad idea. But if you let people do well and chase wealth, they have enough wealth for everybody else and we could help a lot of people out. And I think it's complicated because we can have all these democratic arguments that wealth is concentrated and all that, but that's the physics of wealth. It'll always be concentrated. You change these mediums, companies, countries. To me, wealth is nothing but an entropic complexity that'll keep changing its form and shape. You can keep fighting it or accept its physics and reap the benefit of that physics. I think Elon had this interesting point that wealth is just a database where everyone's wealth I guess is just a row in the database and here's how much everyone has and you're just transferring numbers around and that's the whole economy. No, but the nuance that is important is that you can actually increase the database size infinitely. That's true. And therefore his vision of the sun's energy, if you really convert all the energy to our advantage, the amount of wealth we will create for humans is disproportionate. And all the species that are managed to collaborate and cooperate to create wealth, for example, let's define wealth as biomass. So let's say ants and bacteria and humans are the only few things that have the largest biomass on this planet because we figured out how to make energy work to our advantage.…

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