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The Power of Dreams
Free-Market Motivator 1  2

How did we get saddled with the ideas of scarcity?
     It comes from what everybody saw when they lived in little city-states a few hundred years ago with a little amount of farmland, in sealed economic units where technology didn't change over people's lifetimes.  The best way to improve your life at a time when technology changes slowly is to kill the guy next door and take his land.  As opposed to improving the technology on your land.  But since World War II, technology isn't just changing over a lifetime--it changes every five years.

So, how can people use your insights?
     Don't build a business around monopolizing some product or process. Someone will always find a way to do it better or cheaper.  The first law of business now is no longer "Find a need and fill it," but "Imagine a need and create it."  The best source of products or services that satisfy new needs is what I call RITs--Ready-to-be-Implemented Technologies.  RITs are technological advances that someone has already achieved but nobody has put to use.  Someone invented the electronic fuel injector in the 1970s by applying the microchip to the car fuel system.  It was just as easy to use for the driver as a carburetor, but cost $25 instead of $300 and used half the gas.  The electronic carburetor applied the microchip to the adding machine.
     My own company here in Dallas is in the business of applying the CD-ROM to what we think will be the biggest industry of the next century: education and retraining. 

     (It's late at night when the indefatigable Pilzer drives us to his offices at the Infomart, a six-story white building that houses offices for most of the major computer companies.  We walk in and take the interplanetary-style glass elevators upstairs.)

What do you do here?
     I designed my own format for creating CD-ROMs--presentation quality.  We are the only ones in this business who define ourselves as a publisher, not a software manufacturer.  We have a platform to publish magazines, books, the works.  That's our focus.  We want to define our business as: Are you an expert or an author with a good idea or valuable information?  We want to publish you.  I'll pay you 15 percent.
 

     (He fires up a 486 computer, music starts.)

     We published our first disk with Tony Robbins.  John Dvorak, who writes for PC magazine, calls me up.
     "I don't want to talk to you, Mr. Pilzer, although I got your disk--I'd like to talk to the man who's the software engineer in charge, who built this project."
     "Well, that's me."
     "No, no, the guy who built it, wrote the code and stuff."
     "I built the system."
     Then he reads my resume out loud.  "You went to Russia.  You made all this money.  And you published a book on S&Ls... I don't get it."
     "What's the problem, Mr. Dvorak?"
     "If you can write software like this, why did you waste your life on all that crap?"
     I taught computers while I was at Wharton.  My thesis was building a teaching machine on a DEC-20 mainframe.

     (The CD-ROM speaks from his desk, with pictures of Pilzer and Robbins in various poses.)

     TONY ROBBINS: Yessss! ... Hi.  This is Tony Robbins.  If you're like most people listening to this CD for the first time, you're probably hearing my voice on a compact disk player in your home or car.  But I want you to know this CD isn't like any ordinary CD.... This CD contains the full text--over 1,500 pages' worth--of four national best-selling books, Unlimited Power and Awaken the Giant Within.  And also, Paul Pilzer's best-sellers, Other People's Money and Unlimited Wealth.

What got you interested in CD-ROMs?
     I was addressing a convention of 500 Montessori schoolteachers here in Dallas in 1991.  I was explaining, very excitedly, how I used the CD-ROM encyclopedia at home--when I noticed a lot of puzzled faces in the audience.  I asked how many of them knew what a CD-ROM player was.  About five did.  I was amazed: Here were some of the most dedicated teachers in the country, and they'd never even heard of the greatest technological innovation for teaching since Gutenberg!  I decided to change the whole focus of my career, from macroeconomic theories to helping
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