Move the Free Line
The floor is rising until everyone lives like a millionaire.
The doomers have it exactly backwards. Here's the mechanism they're missing — and the fight worth having.
The doomers have it exactly backwards. Here's the mechanism they're missing — and the fight worth having.
You've heard the story. "A handful of people will get unimaginably rich off AI, and everyone else gets left behind. It won't create the opportunity the Industrial Revolution did."
It's horseshit. It's told by people who don't understand how business actually works — that the engine of capitalism has spent two hundred years doing one thing relentlessly: driving the cost of everything down and the quality of everything up. Agents and robots don't break that engine. They pour rocket fuel on it.
A few win, most lose. Scarcity hardens. Fewer jobs, fewer chances, a permanent underclass watching from outside the glass.
Goods and services race toward free. The floor under every human life rises — until the average person lives better than yesterday's millionaire.
The mechanism
Here's the part almost nobody talks about. As businesses get more capable of delivering more value at less cost, what they give away for free improves too. The free line — the tier you get for nothing — moves up the mountain every single year.
Look at education. Entire universities' worth of knowledge, free on YouTube. Over the last ninety days I've put out seventy-plus pieces of content myself, for free — more than I've been able to put out in a typical year across fifteen years of doing this. And it isn't slowing down: every idea can now become a live website, with a lead magnet, wired into a members area, inside of thirty minutes. Look at Cloudflare — it quietly powers something like 20% of the internet and gives an enormous share of it away for nothing. Businesses still make plenty of money. They just give more away than ever before. Free isn't the loss leader anymore. Free is the flywheel.
Agents and robots drive the cost of everything toward nothing. So the free tier of everything gets richer, faster, forever.
Proof from history
He could throw gold bricks at everyone he passed and never once feel air conditioning. No airplane. No antibiotics. No clean water on demand, no anesthesia, no way to talk to his family a continent away. The wealthiest human in recorded history couldn't buy what a working person now takes for granted before lunch.
And it isn't only the ancient dead. The President of the United States couldn't get an iPhone in the 1990s — Bill Clinton couldn't buy one at any price, because it didn't exist yet. That's the point: no matter how rich or powerful you are, you can't buy what hasn't been invented. And invention is exactly what's accelerating.
That's the pattern, every time, without exception: when a society gets wealthier, the baseline quality of life for ordinary people goes up. Technology democratizes and demonetizes faster than anyone expects. The average person today already has more of the real benefits of civilization — health, mobility, knowledge, connection — than any king in history. We are about to do that again, in a decade instead of a century.
The numbers
This isn't hand-waving. The 1985 millionaire's actual basket — 3,000-sq-ft house in a top-tier suburb, two luxury cars, private K–12 for two kids, four vacations a year (one international), the latest consumer tech, country club dues, part-time domestic help — priced in 2025 dollars, decade by decade:
Solid line is CPI-adjusted. Dashed line is the same basket priced against the actual money supply — the honest monetary lens for anyone who thinks the government inflation number is soft. Both lines cross the same 2036 line. The floor falls either way. Receipts on this page →
The curve isn't guesswork. It's Wright's law compounding across every category the technology touches — the empirical rule that real cost drops 15–30% every time cumulative production doubles. The same law that dropped storage 300,000× per bit, compute seven orders of magnitude, and LLM inference 280× in two years. Moore's law is one famous corner of it. This is the whole room.
The part that can't be priced
Here's the frame that matters more than every dollar figure on this page: your life today isn't just cheaper than a 1985 millionaire's. It's better, in ways their money literally could not fix. Bill Clinton in 1993 could not buy an iPhone. Nelson Rockefeller in 1965 could not buy Wikipedia. The Sultan of Brunei in 1985 could not have a real-time video call with his kid at university, or ask an expert-level intelligence for a diagnosis at 3 a.m., or watch any of ten thousand films in bed on demand. Those things did not exist. No amount of money buys what hasn't been invented yet.
Run the list of what a median-income household in 2026 has that a 1985 millionaire could not have obtained at any price:
These aren't "nice to have." They're the difference between a life spent constrained by what your city, your address, and your rolodex could bring you — and a life where the rate-limiting factor is your own attention. The 1985 basket priced above what a millionaire could afford. It cannot capture what a millionaire could not get. The gap between 1985 and 2026 isn't measured in dollars where these items are concerned. It's measured in categories that used to be zero and are now infinite.
The floor isn't just rising. The ceiling is being rebuilt in categories the old ceiling didn't have.
Sticky vs slippery
Not everything falls. Look at the residual $126K in 2025 and four out of every five dollars are in three places — housing, elite schooling, concierge healthcare. Those don't fall the way a smartphone does. They trade partly on scarcity of position, not just cost of production.
Compute, storage, connectivity, media, photography, video, translation, expert-on-tap advice, navigation, travel. Every doubling of production cuts real cost 15–30%. A median 2025 phone outperforms every 1995 tool a millionaire could buy, in nine categories at once.
Top-tier housing, Ivy admissions, private K–12, concierge medicine, elite clubs. You can't LLM your way into a scarce seat. These aren't priced by production cost. They're priced by who's excluded.
Here's the honest part: in CPI-real terms the positional bundle has moved the other way since 1985. Housing is up. College is up. Concierge medicine is up. In M2-real terms most of those "gains" evaporate, but the sticker price still hits your paycheck in the year you're trying to pay it, so treat them as real for planning purposes. The right frame isn't "everything gets cheap." It's "the useful part of a millionaire's life gets cheap, and the fenced-off part gets unbundled by technology — or gets left behind."
A word on college specifically, because the sticker-price story is misleading. The information is already free. MIT OpenCourseWare, Stanford lectures, and YouTube run every core curriculum. optimus.university gives away serious AI, agent, and robotics training at zero cost right now. What you're actually paying $80K/yr for at a name-brand campus is three things: the credential (a piece of paper that still opens doors), the peer network (a mastermind you can't rebuild alone), and the experience (four years of dorm life). Those are all real, and they're all still gated. But treating that bundle as an "education cost" mislabels it. It's a credential + mastermind fee. On a four-year horizon, a market-research → beta → revenue loop with agents doing the execution beats a four-year degree for most careers, because the landscape you're studying for won't exist by the time you graduate.
The counter-thesis
Here's the piece the housing pessimists miss. Most American land wasn't worthless because Americans didn't want it — it was worthless because it lacked power, water, connectivity, materials, and labor. Fix those five, and every acre in the country becomes livable.
The scariest single line in the residual $126K is the housing line — $69K of it, more than half the total gap. That line breaks the day "good land" stops meaning "walking distance to a coffee shop" and starts meaning "anywhere the robot and the panel work." That's not decades away. It's already happening.
Housing scarcity has always been a scarcity of livable places. The livable places are about to multiply.
The date
The median US household crosses into a 1985-millionaire-equivalent lifestyle around 2035–2038. Aggressive case, 2032. Conservative case, 2045. Even the conservative case fits inside a fifteen-year window.
That's the argument. Not "someday." Not "wouldn't it be nice." The math is on a curve, the curve is a physical law of production, and a working parent alive today gets to raise their kids in the lifestyle that was fenced off behind a million dollars in 1985. The fight is over whether we let that happen — or whether fear talks us into slowing it down.
The unlock
Not as a slogan — as plumbing. Compute. Energy. Agents. Robots. Put those four in the hands of a person and you've handed them a factory that fits in a pocket. Put them in the hands of a nation and you've handed it a seat at the global economy it was locked out of.
The only thing that reliably stops this is people fighting it — fear, friction, and gatekeeping dressed up as caution.
The new shape
Not feudalism. Not mercantilism. I won't pretend I can tell you exactly what it becomes — but I know it won't wear an old costume. Here's the one law I'd bet everything on:
Any system that creates more trust and less friction beats the one before it — and gets adopted. Every time.
People still write checks in a world with cards and crypto. The old rails don't vanish overnight. But they always get replaced by something with less friction and more trust — something we can't fully picture yet from inside the current one. That's not a threat. That's the whole story of progress.
The real recession
Here's the ugly part nobody wants to say out loud: when someone breaks trust, the power structures almost never give it back. They find ways to profit off the friction instead. One guy tried to blow up his shoes on a plane twenty-five years ago — and every one of us is still taking our shoes off at the airport. A tiny minority of bad actors scam people, and now everyone gets a background check on everything.
That's the tax we all pay for a handful of shitheads: friction, everywhere, forever. So here's the work that actually matters. The biggest thing this technology can do is win our trust back — take it back from the bad actors, strip out the friction they forced on the rest of us, and build systems that quietly serve more people better. Less friction, more trust. That's the whole game.
And here's the thing the doomers miss: we've been quietly winning this fight for forty years. Every generation of technology closes a gap the last one left open.
Every scam that gets closed, every friction removed, every trust primitive shipped — that's a small piece of the floor rising. The 2036 destination is the aggregation of a million of those.
The normal is boring. That's the point.
Every media surface is optimized to show you the serial killer, the betrayal, the drama, the collapse. That's not the daily life of most people in 2026. The daily life of most people in 2026 is quietly working out. Food is accessible. Shelter is accessible. Employment is accessible if you want it. If you're even a little strategic, you can get what you need. That's not nothing — that's a civilization mostly delivering on its promises.
Now imagine the next decade: superabundance. The basics get so cheap they're laughably close to free. And here's what happens next, and it's the part almost nobody sees coming — humans finally get the room to deal with their trauma. The first thing that happens when a person gets rich is they suddenly have the time and safety to work on themselves. They stop white-knuckling survival and start actually living. Now do that at the scale of a species. That's what a rising floor buys.
Yes there will be hiccups. Yes there will be trauma along the way. Barring an actual nuclear event or an asteroid, the trend line keeps going. We're on a good trajectory. We should say that out loud more often.
Honest, not delusional
I'm not selling a fantasy. It's not a 0% chance the scary version happens — but the Terminator script is the tail, not the base case. The overwhelming likelihood is that this goes very, very well for almost everyone. And the fastest way to get the bad outcome is to freeze up, hand the wheel to fear, and give up on steering.
So the job isn't to cheerlead and it isn't to doom. The job is to lead it somewhere good. Empower as many AI and robotics breakthroughs as we can. Build the abundance on purpose. Keep removing friction, keep earning trust, and refuse to let the people who don't understand any of this talk the world into surrendering the best thing that's ever happened to it.
Come help us build it
Reading is a warm-up. The floor rises faster when more of us pull on the rope. Two doors in — walk through whichever fits you today.
This is a build, not a hope. The rest of the ecosystem — where the floor gets raised in specific categories:
