Transcription
So why are smart people only focused on making money? Good question. Smart people are smart enough to see past the feel-good commencement speech nonsense about "follow your true passions." That's for dumb people. Smart people know that if you're going to follow your true passions, it better make money.
So why is that? It's because money is power. Well, money is more than power. Money is everything. Do you know that the number one thing that married couples fight about is money? Do you know that almost all of politics just boils down to money? Should we fund Planned Parenthood? Money. Should we fund the war in Ukraine? Money. Universal basic income? Universal healthcare? Should we raise taxes on the rich? It's all just money.
Money can buy you respect. A lot of people don't know this. I have a friend who's like a slacker, talentless loser, but his parents are basically billionaires. His parents got a ghostwriter to write a book for him, so he has a bestselling book. His parents basically donated all this money to Harvard, so he gets into Harvard. He has terrible grades there, of course, but then he just starts a startup, and his dad just keeps injecting capital into it, keeps pivoting and throwing things against the wall until something sticks. And of course, eventually something sticks, and now he's a, now he's a best-selling author with a with a startup. He's a startup founder, and he's a Harvard graduate. So you can imagine him, kind of respect this guy gets at cocktail parties. So money buys respect.
Now, does money buy love? Yes, it does. That surprises a lot of people because they think that, oh yeah, well, at least money can't buy love. Actually, it can buy love. Everyone agrees money can buy sex. You know, it's called prostitution. But money also can buy love. But there's an intermediary. Money buys respect, and then respect buys love. You see, women are hypergamous, so they date up. So they need to look up to you if they want to fall in love with you. That's why women always date men who are taller than them, older than them, smarter than them, richer than them, because they're looking up, figuratively and literally. And that's why the expression exists where it's like the number one thing men care about in relationships is respect, and the number one thing women care about in relationships is love. Because respect is a prerequisite for love for men in relationships, and men know this. And so once you can buy respect with money, you can buy love through respect. And so, yes, money can buy love.
Money can be used for anything. Money can be used for evil. So let's say you have a bully from high school that used to beat you up, and you want to get revenge on him. Once you have money, you can just, you know, let's say his family owns a pizzeria or something. You can just open a pizzeria next to his pizzeria and charge half the price for every slice of pizza until his family business goes out of business. And it's fine because you're, you're providing good, tasty pizza to the community for half the price. So maybe you'll lose $50,000 a year on it, but who cares, right? I mean, you got your revenge, and you crushed your enemies.
So money can be used to crush your enemies. But it does bother me when people say, oh yeah, money is the root of all evil. First of all, that quote from the Bible is misquoted. It's not "money is the root of all evil." It's "the love for money is the root of all evil." And so if you're saying money, money is the root of all evil, you're basically saying you believe humans are inherently evil. And yeah, that's a very Hobbesian kind of view of humanity. Because money, yeah, money is just an intermediary. Money is simply used to facilitate for the barter of goods and services.
A lot of people don't know this, but in the past, humans would just barter. They would just say, like, "Oh, I'll give you 10 donkeys and 10 bushels of wheat if you build my house." And the problem with that is that, well, you know, what are the quality of the donkeys? You know, you don't, you gotta fight over, well, I want healthy donkeys, not sickly ones. And what if it's 10 and a half donkeys, not 10? And you know, you can't just cut the donkey in half. What if you want, you know, what if you want the full donkey?
People decided to use gold as a store of wealth because gold is fungible, gold is divisible. You know, you can just cut it up into smaller pieces, or you can combine it and make a big bar out of it. Gold is, has a lot of value per weight, so it's transferable. Gold doesn't erode. Gold can't be replicated. You know, alchemists have been trying for thousands of years. And there are other reasons too. So people started to go with gold.
But people don't realize that banknotes are basically just deposits on gold. Basically, people would deposit their gold, and they would get receipts on the gold. And so money is just a, is just the receipt on your deposit of gold, rather than carrying around these, you know, clunky nuggets of gold in your pocket or gold coins. People would instead just say, "Well, here's my receipt for the gold. I'll just give you that." And that's, that's the foundation of money. That's where money comes from. That's why money, at least until the Nixon administration, was on the gold standard, so it would stay on, every, every dollar, you know, backed by gold. Because that used to be a necessity. But that, anyways, that's neither here nor there.
Yeah, money is just a medium of exchange. And so money isn't, it doesn't have ethics. Money isn't good or bad. It is simply a medium, and it can be used for good too, not just evil.
So let me ask you this: Who do you think provides more value? Someone who is digging irrigation canals in the Peace Corps, or someone who donates a billion dollars to the Peace Corps? Obviously, it's the guy who donates a billion dollars to the Peace Corps, right? So you can just found some nonsensical sexting app like Snapchat and then just donate a lot of your money to the Peace Corps. You'll do more good for the world than, you know, being a foot soldier on the front lines digging irrigation canals. And yeah, you can hire hundreds of people to do that for you with money. That's why you want to pursue money if you want to do good for the world. Pursue money. Don't just be a foot soldier. Don't be a peon.
Compare, like, being a doctor. You know, should you be a doctor? Or should you, you know, doctors charge market rate for their services. They're not cheap. You know, so if you want to help the world, you shouldn't be a doctor. Doctors don't actually provide much value. They're charging market rate for those services. You want to just make a lot of money, like the founder of Snapchat, and then just donate it to some kind of Doctors Without Borders cause so that doctors will just work in Africa for free. Or just you can just hire doctors, right? You can just pay them to do things. You can fund the Cancer Research Institute. You know, the funds to get people to do research there. It's constrained by money. It's not constrained by researchers. People will do research on cancer if they get paid to do it.
I'll end by saying this: Do you think Warren Buffett and Bill Gates would have done better if they became doctors or worked at a Cancer Research Institute? No, of course not. They're doing better for the world being greedy billionaires because now that they have money, they can donate all of their money to these causes, and they have billions of dollars combined, and they've pledged to donate it to these causes. What that means is that they can hire the entire student body out of Harvard every year for the next 10 years and pay them each half a million dollars a year to go research cancer if they want to. You see, money controls what what ends up happening. It isn't the actual cog in the machine, it isn't the the cancer researcher. It's the money that's paying for the cancer researcher's salary that determines whether cancer research is going to get done. So that's why even if your end goal is to do good, the most effective way to do that is by making money. And that's why smart people are so focused on making money.