Get Out of Tech. IT'S OVER.

All right, tech here. Welcome back. We got a few things to catch up on. I'll cover some of the market news in a moment, but we got to talk about this thing. It is time to get out of tech.

A lot of people think tech is cool for some silly reason. They idolize tech. They want to work in the tech industry. They want to be a tech person. I work in tech. I'm a tech guy. Yeah, that's me. I'm tech. I love tech. I'm the tech lead. People literally define themselves with the word tech. And some people will say tech is fundamental to society. It is the cornerstone of society tech.

But the problem is it is this blind faith, this blind allegiance to tech and coding and programming that people have without truly understanding why is it any good. I mean calculators are tech, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, a new React framework is tech. Yet, these all contribute basically zero to society.

But here's the thing. For anybody who was under age 30 to 35 or so, tech has always been dominant throughout their whole entire lifetimes. And tech has always been in the lead. It is everything. But if you've lived a little bit longer than that, you remember a time when there were nerds who were humiliated in school and tech was nothing. And that nothingness is where I believe tech will return to and where it rightfully belongs.

This whole entire time all of you have been worshiping this false idol of tech coding. You know I remember when I was growing up nobody wanted to be a programmer. It wasn't a thing. The learn to code movement wasn't being pushed out in schools and people instead wanted to be doctors, lawyers, architects, investment bankers, bioengineers. That was really big. Half of the students in my high school went to bioengineering. That turned out to be nothing. But these programmer nerds were not cool. They were humiliated in school. They were scrawny looking pasty dough-faced people. They were poor. About as rich as say a math teacher or a physics professor.

So really at the core of tech is not coding or some shiny whisbang consumer gadget, electronics, some calculator device. It's really all always been about distribution at scale. Internet scale viral exponential growth. And it is that hockey stick growth that is at the core of technology and that is what people and you should be chasing. And so it was really just during that first phase of internet construction that you had to be able to code to be able to get onto the internet. But that's no longer really true anymore these days with social media platforms, creators, no code solutions.

But if you'll notice at the core of almost every Silicon Valley tech company is some dark pattern for viral exponential growth. Like with Apple's iPhone, there was the messaging with the blue bubbles and the green bubbles. And those blue bubbles would only show up for other iPhones, and that helped spur its growth, and everybody had to get one. That was the peer-to-peer communications. That was viral growth. At the bottom of every iPhone message said, "Sent from my iPhone." Same with Hotmail, which was an internet 1.0. At the bottom of every email said, "PS, I love you. Get your free email at Hotmail." Facebook obviously spams your friends. LinkedIn has dark patterns where they import your whole entire address book. And at the core of these Silicon Valley tech companies is that dark pattern of spamming your friends. PayPal was send 10 free dollars to your friends. And Google and Meta at their very core. Even though they do a bunch of other random tech things to confuse you about where they make their money, they are media companies. They make their money not by selling any tech gadget or tech service, but they use tech to create content. Basically right to get you to use their platforms and then what they actually sell are ads. So they are media platforms at their core.

But things have changed where the platform today is arguably no longer even the tech company. The platform today may be the creator. And so if you follow the argument and this is the shift, maybe it is not tech that is so stunning. It is not tech that is fundamental. Maybe it is media. Instead with his viral network effects and growth from peer-to-peer networks. So, for example, Joe Rogan versus Spotify. Who is the platform? Well, Spotify had to pay Joe Rogan $100 million to get him and his viewers to get onto their website. Maybe the creator is the platform, right? It's not the tech company anymore. The people follow the creator. Or Mr. Beast and Amazon. Amazon had to pay Mr. Beast like $100 million for his Beast games.

And so what's happened is after we finished constructing that initial layer of the internet where at first everybody had to be able to code just to gain global internet distribution. Well, now with social media platforms, no code solutions, anybody can just go on there and gain viral growth and distribution. And the opportunity democratized to anybody. And as more user activity consolidated in say just the top five to 10 social media applications online, right? People only use a handful of apps and websites, there's really not much opportunity in coding a brand new website or app anymore. And yet so many people are still mentally stuck in this outdated mindset from one or two decades ago from the old internet era where coding and tech used to be king. But that's really no longer the case anymore.

And there's nothing fascinating or fundamental about some shiny cool whisbang gadget. Like if you take a look at every VR headset goggle, MetaQuest, Oculus VR, Apple Vision Pro, all of those have lost money. I asked Grock about this. Meta has reportedly lost billions in its VR division. Despite dominating consumer market share, Apple's Vision Pro, after the initial hype, has challenges in sustaining profitability at premium price points, still recouping costs from high R&D expenses. We know Google glasses was already cancelled. The Microsoft Hollow Lens has struggled to achieve profitability with significant financial losses and a shrinking market presence by 2025. And yet, all of these are very techy gadgets. They're the epitome of tech. Not a single AI project is profitable. They're all spending billions of dollars training the LLM. I believe Open AI will not be profitable until maybe 2029, like another four, five years just to get there to break even.

And so, what are we chasing anymore in tech? Have we lost our way going after unprofitable investments in VR goggles? Massive expenditures in training AI models or these AI robotics which is this combination of costly expenses in both hardware and AI training. And so I feel a lot of these tech companies and the investors as well like you are chasing after these shiny whisbang gadgets, shiny object syndrome. Anything techy, anything that sounds really cool or futuristic, they think is tech without truly understanding at the core of tech has always been that viral distribution at internet scale.

And really, we've already shifted into an attention economy where everybody is addicted to digital crack on brain rot videos, Tik Tok, and short videos with 10-second attention spans and people want to make millions of dollars overnight. And in such an intention economy, nonviral products, by which I mean any product that does not have viral distribution built in at its core. So I'm talking about like some LLM model or a VR goggle where you can't even capture a selfie or it's a very stupid selfie that you wouldn't actually want to share and has no authenticity. These products will always be struggling to capture and maintain attention to avoid being forgotten in the next 10 seconds.

So really the way I see it, tech is not fundamental or special. It should not be put on some pedestal. It's about as interesting as say a calculator, a vacuum cleaner or washing machine. And what you should chase instead is internet scale distribution. And in today's era with social media platforms, while you can code your way to it, it's going to be extremely difficult to compete with the top 10 apps just to gain a spot there. You can also just be like a creator, right? You can get into media. And if you've noticed, a lot of companies are getting into the media game nowadays with CEOs and VCs being forced to show up on podcasts to present their products. Apple's WWDC going to extreme lanes to film Hollywood production videos just for their product presentations. And the mantra today I think should not be build but create. And the game today really is all about going viral at exponential internet scale. And that changes so many facets of technology for example. Analytics, metrics, data science. You know, these are incremental gains measured week after week and small percentage gains in user activity and usability.

When you take a look at something like Apple's liquid glass actually, you know, Apple's liquid glass went viral. A stunning marketing campaign really achieving hundreds of millions of views probably and now everybody in the world knows about it and many of them want a piece of that and they broke every single usability feature, every metric, every iterative design improvement. They just said screw the contrast accessibility, screw usability. They're just going to do a step function change and make it cool and attention grabbing enough that people want it and spread news about it. And the same really goes for marketing these days, too. Like when you look at how do you gain marketing for your product, you don't do analytics on that. You just get your CEO to go on a podcast with Joe Rogan, right? Or you fund a viral video marketing campaign with hundreds of thousands of dollars. What is the ROI on appearing on Joe Rogan? How do you calculate that? How do you AB test that? How do you do analytics on it? You know, how many Joe Rogan guest appearance podcast campaign should you run? What's the ROI on this? Uh, it doesn't really matter. You can't measure any of it. It's just try to go viral week after week. Get as many viral hits as you can. And you can't really measure or predict how viral something's going to go, but that's the new game.

And so if you continue to follow this argument to its logical conclusion where you chase viral exponential growth in an attention economy, you get to Bitcoin because Bitcoin is the network effect embodied. It is peer-to-peer money incentivized attention and it is native to and fueled by the attention economy capturing organic growth and voice of mouth. So anyways, what I would say is don't be a tech guy and don't be enamored by that blind faith in whisbang shiny technology. There's no pride in being a tech person. There's about as much pride in that as being say a physics professor or a math teacher, which nobody actually wants to be. Instead, be a be a network effects person, right? Chase viral growth.

All right. Now, rant aside, there's some pretty interesting news that I thought I would cover as well in this episode just to catch everybody up here. You know, one thing was that Canada had tried imposing a digital service tax on American tech companies. And this is becoming more common these days. The EU is also imposing DSTs, the digital service tax targeting American big tech companies. And so really the age of these big tech companies may well be over as they are being targeted as a piñata for any broke country out there as a form of retaliation and trade negotiation tool. So really it might be time to get out of big tech and these crazy capital expenditures in AI and VR goggles which nobody has any idea what they're doing and they're just wasting a ton of money and there's no path to profitability here. And if you're an investor in the MAX 7 or S&P 500, you're going to be on the hook for that.

One lesson history is thought on is that if you're going to use energy, you better have social permission to use energy. Uh, so that means you've got to make sure that the output of this AI is socially useful. If we really are not creating social surplus, economic surplus, we just can't consume energy. But that's the real challenge for us as a tech industry is to prove unequivocally that what we have created is showing up in real stats uh that is not just an AGI or AI benchmark. And maybe you should get into capital preservation like Bitcoin.

Take a look at Donald Trump here. He posted a personal letter to the Fed for Jerome Powell. Drum, you're as usual too late. You have cost the USA a fortune and continue to do so. You should lower the rate by a lot. Hundreds of billions of dollars are being lost and he wants a 1% or lower interest rate down from currently around 4.5% where the US is currently one of the highest interest rate countries out there. And so many other nations have been lowering their interest rates in order to stimulate their economies. So this forecast we're going to be printing a lot more money. Trump had also posted just yesterday for all cost cutting Republicans remember you have to get reelected so don't go too crazy with the cost cutting we will make it all up times 10 with growth more than ever before and so this forecasts additional spending so we got to spend and you guys drone power at the Fed has got our backs is the Fed put he's watching the markets and if the markets happen to start going down he's going to just print money and ease up on the rates for us so why not go all in right there is zero downside risk here it's upside.

Now, the other big thing we have to cover today is Robin Hood with their to catch a token event where they made a series of pretty big announcements actually that went live actually today. Now, I tweeted about Robin Hood the other day as a potential stable coin play in addition to Coinbase because as the world goes on chain, people will need wallets and so the wallet really is the gateway to the ecosystem. And although Coinbase is the conventional play that appears well positioned, the reality is that Coinbase's execution is not really clean, their wallet is convoluted, their UI is pretty messy. They have some advanced mode and a normal mode. They have like three or four different types of wallets and you can't trade stocks on there either. Although Coinbase does have a pretty strong developing ecosystem with USDC, Circle, Stripe partnership and they potentially have this trifecta here that they may be able to get ramped up. You can compare that to Robin Hood though. Robin Hood is super clean, right? Tons of people use Robin Hood. It's a very clean app and they're also working on their own stable coin USDG which if they can take USDG to market, they can take on Circle. And so anyways, I gave the signal for Robin Hood and Coinbase. Both of them have been going up recently. Robin Hood is up an additional almost 12% today and that is really based on their announcement.

So what did they do? Well, mostly it is tokenized stocks with dividends that you'll be able to trade in the EU and it's going to be coming to the US assuming there's regulatory approval, but they're also enabling private market stocks including SpaceX, Open AI that you can trade. And this is one way the US is actually falling behind because we don't have access to trading Open AI and SpaceX private stocks whereas people in the EU do. And Robin Hood crypto gained regulatory approval for like every EU nation today as well. And they're going live right away too. That's actually one thing I like about Robin Hood. It's not all just talk. They're backing it up with real action where they are launching on the day of announcement and no more announcements of announcements of further announcements. So that when can we expect an announcement? Yeah. Um, I usually don't like to announce products uh before before they're live. So I think it's right now is about the time where we have to move from talking about it to actually putting product into into people's hands. If you download the Robin Hood EU app, which we gave you ample warning to do, you're about to figure out why we gave you that warning. I'd like to transfer these tokens to you and give you exposure to two of the most valuable private companies in the world right now.

And speaking of tokenized stocks, Kraken's X stocks, their version of tokenized stocks also went live today on the Salona blockchain. And you got to wonder, why don't they use their Inc. blockchain which they've been working on to push this out. Why do they do it on Solana? Who knows? But Robin Hood has been out executing maybe not just Coinbase but Kraken as well. Kraken's tokenized stocks include a 1% spread plus they don't give you dividends whereas Robin Hood will give you the dividends which is a pretty big deal. Now in addition, Robin Hood also announced staking for Ethereum and Solana. They are making USDG their stable coin a first class citizen. So, they're going to be ramping this up and it could be some serious competition for Circle's USDC and they are also building out the Robin Hood blockchain which as I believe is going to be based on the Arbitrum blockchain. And then in a show to take on Bitcoin credit card competitors like the Gemini's credit card or Coinbase One card, they are announcing crypto rewards for their 3% cash back card. And to top it off, for this week only, they are going to be matching any crypto deposit, no limit, up to 2%. So if you deposit, say like 100k worth of crypto assets, you'll get 2% back on that immediately. That's like $2,000 right back. And you just have to keep it there for like a year. So you can check my description, the link below, if you want to sign up for that, get a free stock, right? Why not? If you're going to do it, get your free stock, get your free 2% match. But it is one reason to be bullish on stable coin and tokenized assets. Not just stocks, but private equity markets, real estate, art, any sort of tokenizable asset you can put on chain, trade it 24/7. That sounds like the future.

So anyways, I will conclude with this. You know, I was tweeting away on social media and then somebody left a comment for me that was just absolutely devastating. Counting money is a very boring hobby. And they were right. What are we doing out here? Wasting away our lives counting money, making money. Whereas our focus at some point needs to be shifted into actually living life and spending that money. Arguably, every second in front of a pixel is a second wasted in this unmemorable, unremarkable moment scrolling through social media sites. You're not living, you are preparing to live. And I found over the past week, every time I sat down at this computer, prepared to sit down for a few hours for unremarkable, unmemorable moments of my life where I'm not even living and I'm about to just waste my time. I started craving actual physical sensations like just going outside and enjoying the sunset, taking a walk around, enjoying some air. And so arguably what you should really do and the conclusion that this all leads to of this talk is just buy the Bitcoin, step away and go live and enjoy your life and reclaim your time back. You know, as Sailor said, don't chase. By the way, don't get distracted by your good ideas. Don't chase your good ideas. Satoshi gave you an idea worth half of everything on Earth. The most common mistake entrepreneurs make is they fall in love with their own idea and and then they chase it. You have the world's greatest idea, the greatest idea in the history of the human race. It's there. At Facebook, we had this saying, ruthless prioritization. And what it really means is to prioritize your life ruthlessly because so many things are going to be competing with your time and diverting away your attention. And you need that laser-like focus on that one thing that actually matters. And you got to live with that urgency in mind.

All right, so I hope that cleared everything up. Good chat. I think we all got some urgent actions that we should be doing now, things that we need to go out and buy, make some major life purchases out here. And so with that, hope you enjoyed the video. Let me know your thoughts and I'll see you in the next.