You’ve heard it before: “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” We're taught so from an early age. But history has shown: you often can get something for basically nothing. In this episode, Quincy discusses how we can all enjoy the abundance economy and - for all intents and purposes - get a free lunch. Written and read by Quincy Larson: http://twitter.com/ossia Original article: https://fcc.im/2wxPlpS Learn to code for free at: https://www.freecodecamp.org Intro music by Vangough: https://fcc.im/2APOG02 Check out the book Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think by Steven Kotler and Peter H. Diamandis Transcript:  You’ve heard it before. Maybe you’ve even said it. “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” “You can’t get something for nothing.” “Somebody has to pay.” People recite these sayings with confidence, as though they were quoting Newton’s Laws of Motion. But history has shown: you often can get something for basically nothing. And even when somebody has to pay, that somebody doesn’t have to be you, and the amount doesn’t have to be very much at all. In some cases, the benefits so vastly outweigh the costs that it is — for all practical intents and purposes — a free lunch. How we eradicated Polio from the face of the Earth In the early 1950s, the US was recovering from its worst Polio epidemic ever. Thousands of children died from this virus, and many more suffered life-long paralysis. No one was safe from this horrible disease. Even US president Franklin D. Roosevelt contracted it at age 39. He spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair. Enter Jonas Salk, a medical researcher who had mainly studied flu viruses before turning his efforts toward Polio. Dr. Salk spent 7 years assembling a team of researchers and working to develop a Polio vaccine. He conducted the most extensive field test ever, involving what historian Bill O’Neal says were “20,000 physicians and public health officers, 64,000 school personnel, and 220,000 volunteers.” The vaccine was a success. So Dr. Salk set to work immunizing everyone on Earth. He pushed the marginal costs of the Polio vaccine as low as possible — to just the raw materials necessary — by forgoing any financial benefits his intellectual property would have brought him. When asked about his patent, he said, “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?” Dr. Salk stared down a massive problem and threw himself into it with everything he could, without any aspiration for personal gain. And in the process, he and his colleagues basically wiped out one of the worst diseases ever. Today, everyone’s life is better off as a direct result of this one massive free lunch. “The reward for work well done is the opportunity to do more.” —Dr. Jonas Salk Free lunches are important Before I run through some modern-day examples of free lunches, let me give you some background on myself, and why the notion of a free lunch is so important to me. I run a nonprofit, open source community where you can learn to code, practice by building software for nonprofits, then get a job as a developer. Thousands of people have gotten developer jobs so far. And it’s free. I was so committed to the idea of it being free that I put the word “free” in the name. Free can mean both libre — free as in free speech, and gratis — free as in free beer. Just like the “free” in “Free Open Source Software” (FOSS), the “free” in “freeCodeCamp” means both of these. But still, every day I encounter people who are skeptical. They tell me they don’t use freeCodeCamp because “it sounds too good to be true.” “There’s no way all this can be free,” they say. “I’ll sign up and give you my email address, and only then will I find out that I need to pay $20 a month, right?” Or: “You’re free for now, but soon you’ll throw up ads and paywalls, like everybody else does.” Well, I’ve said this publicly a hundred times, and I’ll say it publicly again: freeCodeCamp will always be free. We operate on the fringe of capitalism. The frontier whe