The "don't print guns" laws? What lobby would that be? I actually agree that the US is very vulnerable to lobbying and that 3d printing restrictions are dumb, but I have no idea how you connected the two.

I don't think there is any software on the planet that has accumulated 1.5 trillion dollars of otherwise-useful money!

"Just like I can learn from a book" - ok. Are you allowed to go to libgen and download a book in order to learn from it, because learning is a fair use?

Look, if you think people who go to elite schools have all the good ideas, just say that. You don't have to wrap it up in high-minded pragmatism.

Put the macros back! It would be so cool!

The whole discussion about exponential growth is idiotic and not worth responding to. But if you think of what he actually means - having a total addressable market of at least a billion dollars and being able to effectively capture it - it is obviously primarily due to factors outside of your control. The sort of company PG is talking about typically revolves around a good technology that has a network effect somewhere that leads to market concentration. People do not get good ideas by working hard, and markets are not made easily monopolizable by hard work. Execution of an idea requires hard work, but companies that are only good at execution do not win.

Obviously you can engage in hard work to improve your odds. But the returns are out of scale with the hard work. This is all people mean when they talk about "earning" money - if it's in proportion with your work, you earned it; if it isn't, you didn't.