Naval: Product and Media Are the Leverage of New Wealth
The most important form of leverage is this idea of products that have no marginal cost of replication. This is the new form of leverage.
You can multiply your efforts without having to involve other humans.
This podcast is a form of leverage. Long ago I would have had to sit in a lecture hall and could reach a few hundred people. 30 years ago I would have to be lucky to get on TV - someone else’s leverage - they would have charged me or distorted the message. But thanks to the internet I can buy a cheap microphone and hook it up to a laptop and all of you can listen.
This newest form of leverage is where all the new fortunes are made. Last generation’s fortunes were made by capital. The new generation’s fortunes are all made by code or media.
Magic combination: High leverage labor of engineers and designers + capital to advertise and scale + code, media, and content to get it out there. That is why you see technology startups explode out of nowhere and make outsized returns.
The new forms of leverage are permissionless.
The robots are already here. There are way more robots than humans. We pack them in data centers. Every software developer has an army of robots working for them.