What Does the World Value Now? (Raw Session)

00:30 — Opening Thought: The Old Way Doesn’t Jive Anymore

Unless it makes sense at all.

The old way, just the way I understood it and grew up, just doesn't jive anymore.

And I don't mean in a dramatic way, and in a world way or anything like that.

I just mean the basic things.

'Cause like I said, like I invest money, I buy stocks, and whatever I felt was important doesn't seem to matter anymore.

The way money moves, the way companies are valued, the way people decide what is important, the way safe investments used to feel safe, and the way attention seems to be worth more than anything else in the planet at the moment.

The way food can be expensive, more expensive than it's ever been, but the people that are producing it and creating it and growing it, they're struggling and there's not many of them left and they're having a hard time.

The way medicine can be one of the most important things in the world along with food and energy.

And people, you got to try really hard convince them to even trust it.

And at the same time, those same people will take something that they heard about online because it helps them look better or helps them feel better.

It just feels like the value system is off.

Or maybe it's not off.

Maybe it's working exactly the way it's designed to work.

And that's the part that kind of gets me.

Because I'm not trying to be conspiracy theorists or anything like that.

I'm just trying to grasp and wrap my head around.

If I need to invest money, I need to plan for future.

Where do I put my money?

Like what I'm used to may not be, or what I think I know may not be reality anymore.

02:25 — The Old Safe Places

Because when I grew up, I always had the basic idea in my head from investing like there's certain things that you got to have.

You got to have food, power, fuel, shelter, medicine, heat, transportation.

And those kinds of things felt like the foundation.

So even when economy's bad, there's a recession, things are hard, times are hard.

Those areas still made sense.

You still had to have shelter, you still had to have heat, you still had to have water, had to have food, transportation even just to get around.

Those things matter.

You need to have medicine, doctors, hospitals.

So when you think about a safe place to put money, not guaranteed, because nothing's guaranteed.

But they felt safe, steady, like a long-term place to put your money.

They were institutions that possibly weren't gonna go away, like food companies, utilities, energy, health care, banks, infrastructure.

Really like the boring stuff you can think of.

Still, to my mind, feels like the safest place.

But even in times, they lose money.

And they don't grow the same.

And they cut dividends.

03:41 — Where the Growth Seems to Be Now

But when you look at where the excitement is, where the insane evaluations.

SpaceX.

Where the growth is, it feels the world has shifted.

I'm not saying that like always new something new comes out something big.

Big change in the market industry.

Yes, that's where that's brand new. That's exciting. It's a new IPO coming out. Yes, that is going to get an initial track.

It may have a lot of ups and downs, volatility, but in the end there's a market being created or disrupted it makes sense to me.

So it's going towards, in my mind.

The money is not just going toward what people need anymore.

It's going towards whoever controls people the attention.

Which was to feed the cloud, chips, the data, the model.

Whoever controls the layer between people and the rest of the world controls the layer between the food, the medicine, the fuel.

Whoever controls that is who's technically more of the money should go I guess at this point.

04:57 — Free Is Not Really Free

But even those things could shift because like think about Facebook's free, Instagram's free, YouTube search, a lot of AI tools have free versions.

Even if you pay a lot of it feels free.

Gemini, Copilot. Open AI has a free one.

But they're not really free.

None of it's free and we all know that.

If you're not paying for something you are the product.

The attention is the product.

The behavior, the data, the habit, those are the products that people are paying for.

And whoever can hold your attention the most, where everyone is fighting for your attention, that becomes the most valuable part.

And that's where the people are placing their value at the moment.

And it's more valuable than the thing they're selling.

So if you can grab the attention, hold the user, hold the eyeball, get the click, you are worth more than the thing that people are trying to sell to you.

I understand the business model.

I understand the logic behind it.

Advertising, scale, data, recommendations, AI, global reach.

I get why it works.

But emotionally, as a regular person looking at the world, it still feels backwards.

Because food keeps people alive.

Power keeps the lights on.

Fuel and energy move the world.

Keeps you healthy and alive.

But the companies treat it like the future or the companies controlling the screen in front of your face.

The phone in your hand.

And that's hard for me to really process and move my investments to match that reality.

06:55 — Thinking Out Loud While Following the Script

And that's why I'm doing this ramble right now.

So I'm trying to stick the script but I'm going off at the same time.

And I know I keep bringing that up in my video.

But I want people to know that there is a big distribution between reading the script and me just thinking out loud at the same time.

So yeah, this is the hard part for me to wrap my head around.

And one example.

This is what made me really think about this.

On Instagram the other day a post came up about Facebook Reels.

Just the Reels.

A TikTok competitor.

Not even their main product.

Just a part of Facebook.

Just stuff people scroll through while waiting in line, sitting on the couch, avoiding whatever else they should be doing.

That's what I like to say it.

And that one feature inside one company is generating more revenue than Airbnb.

Netflix.

This is what gets me.

They make about the same amount of revenues Tyson Foods.

They make more money than Nike.

This one blew my mind.

Reels generates more money than Coca-Cola.

That's insane.

08:23 — Reels, Coca-Cola, and Tyson Foods

Not because Reels has no value.

Obviously, apparently it has value.

People use it every time.

Keeps attention, moves products, shapes culture, changes habits.

But still, Coca-Cola is everywhere.

Coca-Cola.

The polar bears at Christmas.

Your name on the Coke bottle.

Like Coke literally is everywhere.

I own Coke.

Warren Buffett is one of the first investors.

He loves Coke.

Reels makes more money than Tyson Foods.

They put the food on the table man.

They have physical products.

They feed the world.

Factories, trucks.

It's in the grocery stores.

And Reels makes just as much money as them.

And Reels is not even the company.

It's just a product within a product.

Man oh man.

That's, you kind of take a second to think about that.

And somehow that's valued like one of the biggest businesses in the physical world.

Wow.

And that's where I keep coming back to this question.

What does the world actually value now?

Because it's not that the food stopped mattering obviously.

Food matters more than almost anything.

09:51 — Food Still Matters, But Where Is the Money Going?

You see it every time you go to a grocery store.

Beef prices are through the roof.

Groceries prices in general through the roof.

Everything costs more.

And yes, there are very good reasons for a lot of that inflation.

Transportation.

Fuel cost.

The packaging.

Labor.

Which I think is going to dramatically drop.

So I've already talked about that, but I think there's a few more videos coming around that one.

Interest rates, supply chain, all of that adds up.

All of that is needed.

But when you look at the people closest to the actual food, farmers, ranchers, producers, a lot of them are the ones, they're not getting rich.

A lot of them are actually shutting down.

They could really stay afloat.

So the consumer pays more.

The grocery store is making money.

Grocery stores are a big part of my portfolio, but they're not growing like Reels.

But yet you go there every day, or at least once or twice a week.

And they're making money, but they're not.

Where's the money going?

The processors move huge revenue, but the people producing the thing that we actually need to stay alive, and they're trying to sell those on the shelf, those people are not making any money.

And the people that are making the money are like Facebook because they're the ones showing us the product on the grocery store and getting us to go to the grocery store.

This is me rambling here now.

So the platform that is used to grab my attention, to show me the product that gets me to the store, is the tool that's valued the most at this point.

Wow.

11:39 — Attention Scales Differently Than Food

So I'm going to go back to this and then a platform that sells attention can scale in a completely different way.

And that's true.

They can scale a different way.

And one more person watching videos does not cost the same as feeding another cow or buying more land to plant more stuff, get a tractor, get feed.

Understand that adding more eyeball, getting more eyeballs to stay on your screen longer does not cost the same as putting another box of cornflakes on the shelf.

And one more ad impression does not cost the same as raising cattle, producing the beef, processing the beef, shipping it in packaging.

So I understand why market values the tech different or the farmer different or the grocery store different or the transportation truck different.

But understanding does not make it feel less strange.

Because you think the value would go to the thing that you truly want, not the thing that told you you wanted or made you think you wanted it.

Because right now the thing that matters most can be low margin and the thing that distracts us can be high margin.

I said something.

I don't know exactly what.

But it says something.

And you can see this in other places too.

13:02 — AI Still Needs the Physical World

So this is where I go and it like AI feels digital and abstract.

It's a piece of code basically, but underneath it is still physical.

There's chips.

There are data centers and needs cooling.

It requires power, needs building, which means land, wires and infrastructure.

It's all these things.

So even the future that feels like software still depends on all the boring infrastructure, the physical items.

But the energy that runs it may be valued less than the model itself.

The building may be valued less than the company that's renting the space to compute.

The power grid may be valued less than the chips.

And the chips, the chip is valuable now because it's scarce.

Maybe one day, if there are enough chips, the value moves somewhere else.

It moves to the code.

It moves away from the chips themselves.

So all the physical items are not valued the same as the digital items.

And that's the part I keep trying to understand.

The value keeps moving up the chain.

From the physical thing to the system around the thing to the platform above the system, whoever controls the attention, who controls the access or the bottleneck.

Because right now chips are the bottleneck, they get the most.

But then once that's fixed, then it goes back to the model.

It goes back to the code.

It goes back.

Then it doesn't even go there.

Goes to who has the attention.

14:24 — Medicine, Trust, and What People Can See

And I don't know, it's like medicine has a version of this too, because you still need medicine, you need doctors, you need vaccines.

I believe we need vaccines to help prevent disease and spread.

We need hospitals to help people and help the sick.

But trust in medicine now gets filtered through mostly social media, gets filtered through fear, politics, and whatever story someone's seeing online.

People begin to trust the advice they get from those Reels.

Instead of trusting the doctors and scientists and chemists, the studies, the results, the tests, they see an influencer showing weight loss, muscle gain, puffy lips, perfect skin.

So they are willing to take the pill, inject the needle, put the cream on, do whatever because the results they see in the Reels are visible and they have their eyeballs, they have their attention.

They can see it.

They can measure it.

They can post it.

Maybe that's probably the same problem.

We seem to value what we see, what we can measure.

We value what gets our attention and what can be sold and what we can turn into growth.

But the things that quietly hold everything together are harder to value.

15:50 — Invisible Until It Breaks

Food is invisible until the price goes up.

And I say because we just go buy stuff randomly.

We know what we're gonna get and we don't notice it until we look at the bill basically.

Power is invisible until the lights go off.

You just pay the bill, the lights are on, you're on the internet, you're good to go.

Medicine is invisible until you get sick.

You don't need it.

You don't think about it.

Infrastructure.

That's invisible until there's a road blockage, or there's a flood in a building.

Until all that happens you don't even notice it's there.

You just take it for granted.

And maybe that is why this all feels so strange to me.

The world still depends on the boring physical things.

Food, power, medicine, shelter, infrastructure.

But the biggest rewards seem to go to the layer above, the attention layer.

I don't know, reverse this first data layer, platform bottleneck, but really it's the attention and the thing that controls that attention.

The thing that sits between people in the world, the Reels, the Facebook, the Instagram, the stories, the YouTube.

I'm on YouTube right now.

I'm not great name was attention.

I got a few of you and I'm happier here.

17:10 — What Gets Rewarded

So I don't think I'm saying the old things stop mattering.

I think I'm saying they still matter maybe more than ever, but the world does not always reward what matters most.

It rewards what scales.

It rewards what captures attention.

What controls the choke points.

It rewards what can turn human behavior into revenue.

Whoever controls the eyeballs, the clicks.

Those are the people that are valued the most.

And that's what feels off to me because when you grow up you think important things should be valuable.

The basic parts of life to keep you alive should be the most valuable things.

And they are.

Because they keep you alive.

But from your wallet, your checkbook, and your retirement plan, they don't seem to be the most valuable thing anymore.

It's not always the people closest to the work.

Not always at the same level.

Not always at the same level as the company controlling the system around them.

18:12 — The Main Question

So I don't really have a clean answer here.

I'm just trying to sit with the question.

What does the world value now?

Not what do we say we value, not what sounds important, but what actually gets rewarded?

What gets funded?

What gets scaled, protected?

What gets the attention?

And when I look at it that way it feels like the answer is not just food, power, medicine, infrastructure, even though we still need all the things.

The answers seem to be attention, access, control.

Being able to scale something.

Keep your margins high.

Margins low.

The layer between people and reality.

And I don't know if that means the world does not make sense anymore.

Or if it makes perfect sense and I just don't like it.

I don't know.

It's, uh, hmm.

19:15 — Looking Back at Facebook

I go back to when Meta went, well Facebook at the time went public.

To me, it made no sense.

They don't make any revenue.

They make no money.

They're losing money.

But then quickly they become one of the most profitable companies and you try to reevaluate how you look at what is considered valuable and important in the world.

From a financial point of view, I guess.

It's a difficult one because I still banks, grocery stores, food processing.

But because all these companies now, I believe AI is going to help them be more efficient, help them do better breakthroughs.

But I also think a lot of them are following these trends.

They're coming up with things that aren't things that make you live longer.

They're coming up with things that make you feel better and look better.

And I'm sure there's a lot of people in there that are still making things that keep you alive and keep you from getting sick and help you get better that way and live longer.

But they're also not naive either because they're public companies and they have to think about the shareholders.

20:41 — Closing Thought

So I am holding on to the ones that I have just because I do believe that at some point this will turn back into normal reality.

At the same time, I'm hoping to get a little piece of the pie at SpaceX because I strongly believe that that is going to be a very important company.

But to me, that has value.

It has a product.

It's actually trying to do something.

But at the same time, it also has AI built into it.

And it also has the communication level of Starlink.

It has the power with the soldiers and the satellites.

So there's a lot of physical things within that one IPO along with the attention layer.

It has the eyeballs right now just because of how big it is.

Anyway, there's a lot of rambling going on.

So I'm going to finish this one.

And I am going to do more videos because this is a deep thought.

I just woke up and started thinking like, "What is going on?"

So I had to make this video.

So thanks for watching.