Business Breakdowns
· Blake Saunders
[00:00:00] S1: I'm not trying to be the 3 a.m. radio show of the aliens are coming—play out these basic trends. So if everyone gets an extra hour because of technology, are they going to put down their phones? I see this every time I take my son to the playground. Everyone else is on their phone, which is crazy to me. Put your phone down. If people are given an extra hour, AI is going to be more addicting, not less. The world's not going to end. For people that are operating businesses, it should be okay, but you just need a recognition that is probably why I started my own firm: you have to be a creator of economic value. That's the only way to sort of exist. You can't be an employee and then there has to be a significant recognition—one or two percentage changes in the economic base and how people are employed. If we just take out drivers in the US, semi-truck and Uber drivers, that's a big hit to the income base. It has happened before when we had to pay back the debt from World War II, where the tax rates were much higher for an extended period of time. It's less about worrying about it and more about looking at where the trends are going. If you have the realization you could see the COVID lockdowns coming a couple weeks before, and I think you can see this coming now, where the income base is going to go down, the taxes are going to go up. There's still a society that you and I want to exist in which is less technology and more creative. I think there'll be a lot of creativity happening, but for the majority of Americans, and that is today, 60% of Americans are overweight. It's just a fact.
· Matt Reustle
[00:00:00] S0: It's fascinating. I think there's a lot of points that tie into everything else to wrap things up. If I take what you're saying, if you're to measure attention as being value, which we can debate, social media, the platforms, they're gaining more and more of that share, getting that addiction humming stronger, faster, harder. So those feel like obvious winners. You can make the case that the individual creators or the upstarts who are creating this real connectivity to an audience, there are also net winners in this new environment. Is there anyone else that you would point to that you think could be a winner that emerges from all of this that maybe isn't as obvious?
· Blake Saunders, Matt Reustle
[00:00:00] S1: The winners are independent content creators. Someone said this—there's never been more independent bookstores. Comedians now don't need a Netflix special, even though they all still want to get that check mark to say that they did that. Some of the highest paid streamers are 21 years old. You see a future where a lot of them have big brand partners and sponsorships, and then some of them have made their own products and things like that. So as much as there's a negative downside with social media and its addictiveness, there's also a platform when your content resonates to really scale. There's never been a time like that. Oprah says this when she first got her break, that's why she changed her name. She had to fit within this mold of what they wanted. And then you look at Kai Cenat or these younger streamers—they're whoever they want. I think the one positive thing is they give their generation the ability: you don't have to be polished. One of them said their highest rated stream was when a mouse ran into their room and they freaked out. There is an opportunity to show a bit more of their real life and show people of any age it's okay to not live this perfect world. So I think that's a positive. [00:00:00] S0: I think so, too. There's a trust level and an authenticity, especially in the age of AI, which is even more powerful. This has been a pleasure. I know it was very wide ranging. So thank you for diving deep on so many topics. Thank you again for sharing the knowledge here. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah.