Abundance Is Coming! (But Don't Hold Your Breath)

Just trust them. The billionaires who benefited most from "trickle-down economics" now promise we'll all share in the "explosive wealth" AI will create.

The future will be a-mazing.

Advances in AI have put us on the verge of radical abundance.

It's definitely happening.

Sooner than you expect.

Best of all, everyone gets to share in this explosive wealth!

But don't take my word for it.

The "besties" on the All-In Podcast — including former co-host and now recurring guest David Sacks (Trump's current "AI Czar") — can't stop describing how we'll soon be working less, getting better healthcare, and enjoying more free time with our loved ones, thanks to "AI's Abundant Future."

David Friedberg said as much on the All-In podcast on June 1. Here's the YouTube short version:

As Friedberg puts it:

Folks are underestimating and under-realizing the benefits, at this stage, of what's going to come out of the AI revolution and how it's ultimately going to benefit people's availability of products, cost of goods, and access to things.

Sounds great! But there's more:

The next phase is we're gonna end up (working) less than 30 hours a week with people making more money and having more abundance for every dollar that they earn, with respect to what they can purchase and the lives they can live.

That means more time with your family, more time with your friends, more time to explore interesting opportunities.

And Friedberg is not alone in predicting a new age of abundance. One recent guest he welcomed onto the podcast promoted the idea that AI will soon bring about 15% global GDP growth, delivering the kind of productivity gains that would make deficit and debt concerns a thing of the past.

In 2024, friend of the show Elon Musk described a future of "abundance" in which "AI and robotics will drop the cost of goods and services to almost nothing" and "essentially any goods and services will be available in quantity to everyone. Basically, if you want something, you can just have it."

In 2023, venture capitalist, would-be supervillain, and reason enough for anyone to quit Substack Marc Andreessen penned “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” in which he predicted "abundance" will bring "falling prices," leading to "an upward explosion of buying power, real income, and quality of life."

In 2024, Andreessen's VC firm went all-in on the "Abundance Agenda" declaring that technological progress will create a world of infinite abundance for every consumer in virtually all aspects of their lives.

Google DeepMind CEO (and winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize for Chemistry) Demis Hassabis recently told 60 Minutes that AI could end disease and lead to an era of "radical abundance."

In his recent blog post "The Gentle Singularity," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote that by the 2030s, "intelligence and energy—ideas, and the ability to make ideas happen—are going to become wildly abundant.... with abundant intelligence and energy (and good governance), we can theoretically have anything else."

These AI visionaries are so persuasive, they've even convinced laggards like MAGA Mark Zuckerberg that the only way he can stay in the game is to lure his competitors' best researchers to work for the new Meta Superintelligence Labs with $100-million signing bonuses and hundreds of millions more promised over the next few years.

Doesn't it just warm your heart to hear how enthusiastically these tech bros and billionaires talk about sharing the wealth?

In the new "Era of Abundance" the cost of everything will be lower. It's a soon-to-be-realized future in which, according to Andreessen-Horowitz:

Every consumer can be an author, programmer, designer, artist, poet, movie producer, musician, and more.

Every consumer can have an infinitely empathetic, patient, interested, and engaging friend, lover, sparring partner.

Every consumer can have a team of teachers, doctors, therapists, and wealth managers to help them live their best life.

Just don't ask for a free bus pass

Until a few weeks ago, the "Abundance Agenda" seemed unstoppable. Elon was running (amok within) the government. Data centers were bursting out all over. Soon the cost of everything would come crashing down!

But then that bastard Zohran Mamdani ruined everything.

Without even a data center proposal or a large language model to sell, Mamdani insisted that a new kind of abundance was possible in New York City today — an abundance that included free buses, affordable housing, and (shock horror!) city-owned grocery stores.

Mamdani wasn't offering anything lavish. Unlike Andreessen, he stopped short of promising "an upward explosion of buying power, real income, and quality of life." By comparison, the NYC mayoral candidate held out a vision of normal, basic, some Europeans might even say, quotidian, stuff.

But the tech bros were having none of it.

Here's All-In "bestie" David Friedberg in another You Tube short after Democratic Socialist Mamdani won the Democratic party's primary contest for the 2025 New York City mayoral election:

Affordable housing? Cheaper groceries? Hell no!

According to Friedberg, voters who chose Mamdani are part of a "revolution against the system that brought them to this moment" — killing their hopes of the American Dream — by inflating the cost of education so much that 32 million young Americans are now "living in places where they cannot afford to pay their bills every month and they will never get out of the debt cycle they were thrust into."

The big problem, as Friedberg sees it, is that these annoying college-educated voters don't simply wait for the tech bros to give them all the abundance they could possibly imagine — perhaps, say, a virtual reality tour of a luxury yacht.

They simply use the one power they still have left: the voting booth.

You hear a guy like Zoran show up and say, 'There can be a better path forward.' The better path forward is: the government can and should do more to help, and in doing more to help we will increase government. We will tax the rich; we will tax the corporations; we will take all of that capital and redistribute it in the form of services, and checks, and support for all the people who find themselves unable to take care of themselves.

This becomes a tipping point when the majority of the voter base ends up in that situation—when they’re that deeply in need, where they have negative capital—and that is the situation America finds itself in today. There is no easy answer, and there is no easy solution out of this, but I can tell you one thing for sure: in historical perspective we have seen it time and time again across dozens of countries that embraced socialism to get out of the debt cycle, that ultimately absorbs and swallows up the young. It swallows up every family; it swallows up every person in the working-class with debt—they’re swaddled in it. They all try to get out of it by increasing government and embracing these socialist concepts, and it has never, ever worked. More government is not the answer—less government is.

The rest of the All-In "besties" — Jason Calacanis, Chamath Palihapitiya and Sacks — all joined Friedberg in bashing Mamdani for the crime of promoting rent freezes, non-profit groceries, free buses and childcare, along with a desire to tax the rich.

Late-June Friedberg makes me distrust early-June Friedberg

Readers of this article are old enough to remember when David Friedberg confidently told us how badly we were underestimating the benefits of the AI revolution, that we'd soon be working less and having access to unlimited cheap stuff, with more abundance for every dollar that we earn and more time with our families, more time with our friends, and "more time to explore interesting opportunities."

If you believed what he said about "abundance" a few paragraphs ago, it's difficult to square that with his assertion that "there is no easy answer, and there is no easy solution" out of the current predicament faced by young, college-educated (and debt-laden) Americans in an economy where, outside of education and healthcare, job opportunities have completely dried up.

If, as Friedberg claims, abundance is coming soon, abundance is the only answer Friedberg is looking for.

If that abundance is as radical as we're being promised, why would billionaires and broligarchs have a problem with sharing a little of that future wealth right now?

Why not let a little abundance start "trickling down" today?

Even as they rail against socialism, regulation, and practically all forms of government intervention, today's tech CEOs are relentlessly touting a near-future utopia where a new form of "wealth distribution" will take place.

But if they hate socialism so much, how exactly does all the unimaginable wealth they predict get shared?

In their imagination, it happens because of capitalism — because AI and robotic automation boosts productivity so much that everything gets cheaper and more abundant.

Trust us, they say, AI will lift all boats!

It's the same promise we heard at the inception of trickle-down economics.

But the wealth never seems to trickle down.

Could it be that the billionaires and broligarchs — the people who keep growing richer even as millions fall further behind — like the system just the way it is?

Is that why, even as they preach abundance, tech CEOs are busy busting unions and firing workers by the thousands?

If the richest people in the world are loudly opposing free bus rides today, can we really trust them to share any of the spoils they reap tomorrow?

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