Wealth is assets that earn while you sleep; it’s the factory of robots cranking out things. Wealth is the computer program running at night that’s serving other customers. Wealth is money in the bank that is reinvested into other assets and businesses.

The purpose of wealth is freedom; it’s nothing more than that.

It is competitive to some extent. It’s a positive sum game—but there are competitive elements to it, because there’s a finite amount of resources right now in society.

Money is how we transfer wealth. Money is social credits; it’s the ability to have credits and debits of other people’s time.

We transfer these IOUs around; money is how we transfer wealth.

There are fundamentally two huge games in life that people play. One is the money game. Money is not going to solve all of your problems; but it’s going to solve all of your money problems. I think people know that. They realize that, so they want to make money.

But they’re actually playing the other game, which is the status game. They’re trying to be high status in the eyes of others

Status is your ranking in the social hierarchy.

Wealth is a very positive-sum game. We create things together.

Status, on the other hand, is a zero-sum game. It’s a very old game. We’ve been playing it since monkey tribes. It’s hierarchical.

To be the winner, there must be a loser. Fundamentally, I don’t like status games. They play an important role in our society, so we can figure out who’s in charge.

Hunter-gatherers lived in entirely status-based societies. Farmers started going to wealth-based societies. The modern industrial economies are much more heavily wealth-based societies.

People creating wealth will always be attacked by people playing status games

The problem is, to win at a status game you have to put somebody else down. That’s why you should avoid status games in your life—because they make you into an angry combative person.

Ethical wealth creation makes abundance for the world

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. The better ones are symbiotic, they’re giving something back. But there are a lot that are just taking. That’s the nature of how any complex system is built.

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.

The engine of technology is science that is applied for the purpose of creating abundance. So, I think fundamentally everybody can be wealthy.

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 yields, where you have corruption, or you have monopolies.