Naval sees abundance as the output of creating wealth through leverage. Unlike status competitions, abundance creates more for everyone.
“What I am focused on is true wealth creation. It’s not about taking money. It’s not about taking something from somebody else. It’s from creating abundance.” Ethical wealth creation makes abundance for the world.
Science applied through code creates radical abundance. “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. We would all be living in massive abundance.” Work becomes creative expression, not survival.
But our evolutionary wiring creates problems. “Most of modern life, all our diseases are diseases of abundance, not diseases of scarcity.” Sugar, information, distractions once helped us. Now they overwhelm us. “Now, it’s all disease of abundance. We are overexposed to everything.”
Internet leverage proves the paradox. “What the internet gave us before was digital abundance. I can make copies of everything. That was a very big idea. I can make one podcast and ship it to everybody.” This created fortunes through compounding distribution. It also created traps. “The avalanche of all the abundance of things that are thrown at you that are really traps, like video games are traps.”
Books and knowledge show the same pattern. [“The means of learning are abundant. It’s the desire to learn that’s scarce.“](transcripts/rich.md#the-means-of-learning-are-abundant-the-desire-to-learn-is-scarce) Information is infinite. Attention is finite.
True abundance flows from what only you can do. “So, I strongly believe that it is innate to the human species, and we are going to create more and more wealth, and abundance for everybody.” This requires good judgment about what to build and taking responsibility for outcomes.
Naval’s solution requires discipline: become an ascetic. “The way to survive in modern society is to be an ascetic. It is to retreat from society.” Abundance without restraint becomes suffering.