Ambitious Canada Part 9: Permission to Build... What?

There is a miracle sitting in your pocket right now.

Decades ago, the computing power you hold in your hand would have cost millions of dollars. It would have filled a room. Today, you can have it for $500.

This is the fundamental promise of engineering and technology. Our job, at its best, is to make the impossible possible and the expensive affordable. We take scarce resources and, through innovation, make them abundant for everyone.

But if you look around at the general public today, they don’t feel like they are living in an era of abundance.

The Disconnect: Innovation for the Few

For most people, the things that actually define their quality of life—housing, food, energy, transportation—are not getting cheaper. They are getting more expensive than ever.

While we have been busy making digital pixels virtually free, the physical world has become unaffordable.

Why? Because the market follows the money. In the US, more than 50% of the buying power comes from the top 10% of the population.

From a pure capitalist perspective, it makes perfect sense to ignore the struggling majority and build new toys for the people who have money to spend. It makes sense to build luxury electric trucks, optimization tools for ad-tech, and subscription services for the wealthy.

For the top 10%, life has never been better. They have access to conveniences that were unimaginable a generation ago. For everyone else, the “tech revolution” feels like a party they weren’t invited to.

We Have the Power (But We Waste It)

The tragedy isn’t that we can’t solve these problems. It’s that we choose not to.

Look at the AI revolution. In just a few years, we have deployed trillions of dollars in infrastructure—data centers, GPUs, energy grids—to address a problem that didn’t even exist five years ago.

This proves that society has the capacity to do insane things at a trillion-dollar scale when there is a new market to conquer. We can move mountains when we want to.

But look at what we sometimes choose to move mountains for.

The worst example is Crypto. We burned immense amounts of energy, talent, and capital to build a complex infrastructure for “decentralized finance” that, frankly, most regular people didn’t want and didn’t need. We built a solution in search of a problem, fuelled by speculation rather than value.

Why The Public Doesn’t Trust Us

This is why the “Builder” movement often hits a wall.

We go to the government and say, “Remove the barriers! Let us build! Deregulate zoning! Deregulate AI!”

But we never answer the second half of that sentence: “Let us build… what?”

The general public doesn’t believe that Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk has their best interests in mind. And why should they? We haven’t earned that trust. When they hear “deregulation,” they don’t hear “cheaper housing for me.” They hear “more profit for them.”

The New Deal for Builders

If we want the government and the public to change their attitude towards us, we must change our attitude towards them.

We need a new deal. We need to say: “If you lift the chains, we promise to build things that matter to you.”

We need to unleash “builder energy” not just on the next consumer app or speculative asset, but on the unsexy, hard, physical problems that crush the average family.

• Don’t just build a metaverse; build a way to reduce construction costs by 50%.
• Don’t just build a new coin; build automated agriculture that drives food prices down.

If we go after these meaningful projects, we can prove that builders are not just in it for themselves. We can prove that technology is still a force for democratization, not just wealth concentration.

It Matters What You Build

So, this is my advice to the builder community.

Stop asking for permission to build in the abstract. Start talking about what you will build.

It matters more now than ever. We have the capital. We have the talent. We have the technology. Let’s win back the trust of the public by building things that are less like crypto and more like the miracle in your pocket—innovations that actually make life better, for everyone.

Let’s build things that matter.