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Down to earth

My bets for 2026

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While building a social media analytics product, I’ve been trying to get off of social media myself. I spend a lot of time building on and deeply thinking about the firehose of the world’s information, and the last thing I needed after a long day of work was to consume a firehose of the world’s information, on a blindingly small device. I needed something slower diverted my attention towards books. I spent the year reading dozens of books about the history of civilization / anthropology, the history of religion and materials from different philosophies / schools of thought, romances and novels that explored the human condition, and preferred long-form articles that dove into current events over short headlines. I didn’t have a “goal” in mind, I was just following my interests. It was common for me to quit a book halfway through, pick up something else that was more interesting at the time, and come back to it later – I operated on pure curiosity, no rules at all. 

By studying the past, I became extremely interested in the future. The future of social networks, the future of attention and entertainment, the future money, and the future of geopolitical power. In doing so, I’ve conceived 4 thematic “bets” that will act as a guiding thesis over the next 1-5 years. I’ve split these 4 bets into 2 themes, allocating 2 bets to each; culture and macro. My cultural bets are a fairly subjective assessment of society, approached from a historical and critical lens, focused on the evolution media and its impact on humans. My macro bets are investment-focused themes that will guide my investment strategies over the coming years.

Cultural bets can be summarized as an epistemological rebalancing: 

Gravitas and Discernment

Macro bets can be summarized as a materialist pivot:

Reality and Hard Money

In essence, these bets reflect a systemic pivot toward authenticity, decisive truth-finding, tangible fundamentals, and sound money, in response to what I consider extremes of the past era. When I started writing this, I just wanted a way to analyze my own thoughts, but in doing so I was inspired to explore each bet in depth, identifying potentially measurable indicators of progress, and doing my best to distinguish secular vs. cyclical dynamics. What started as a 30 minute thought experiment turned into a week-long journey over the holiday. 

Here we go…

Gravitas

“Water, water, every where, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink.” – Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I believe every medium has an implicit theory of knowledge, and when that medium dominates a certain point of time, it impacts how populations define what is truth:

  • Print: “I’ll believe it if it’s rigorously argued, extensively evidenced, and thoughtfully curated.”
  • TV: “I’ll believe it if it’s vivid, evokes a familiar emotion, and easy to recall.”
  • Social feeds: “I’ll believe it if my social graph approves, it repeats, and it’s easy to share.”

This happens because mediums don’t only change how information is consumed, they actually shape the content that’s produced. A print-dominant world produces content that thrives in print; cross-examined, detailed, and not afraid of depth. A TV-dominant world produces content that thrives on TV; vivid imagery, emotional provocation, and entertaining. Compared to print, TV makes certain kinds of truth dominate, that may not resonate in print; image, charisma, and immediacy. Social media experienced on mobile devices expands upon the TV and amplifies its truths – by transferring the power of video production from production studios to individuals, by removing physical boundaries and making entertainment portable, and by leveraging advanced algorithms to route “viral” content. The mobile social experience is vivid immediacy on steroids.

Paradoxically, the removal of physical boundaries "shrinks" the global population into a tribal-like state of close proximity. How so? Before the Telegraph, the information one consumed on a daily basis was restricted to such information that was easy to disseminate and/or fairly relevant to an individual, such as being directly transferred from somebody within your social circle, or read directly from a local article in print. Typically, there was no easy way to receive information across medium or long distances, unless specifically intended to be (like mail). Social media is akin to the Telegraph; we are able to transmit content to strangers over long distances, with those strangers capable of providing an immediate response. Because of this, the average social media user is inundated with non-relevant, non-actionable information, that previously, prior to the Telegraph or Telegraph-adjacent technologies, would’ve never hit their eyes or ears. Additionally, our personal lives are now hardly personal – they’re increasingly digital, and therefore subject to judgement by the masses, shrinking what our brains consider a physical distance. Judgement and another’s immediate opinion previously required a 3-6 foot range, but now, has no distance restriction. One is able to involve themselves in the tribe’s affairs from either 3 feet or 3,000 miles away — the distance doesn’t restrict immediate participation. Perhaps you’ve heard the term “global village” – this is what we are. But with social media, we’re able to consume much more of the world’s information, on a 6 inch device, with content that’s algorithmically distributed, optimized to keep us entertained, and that’s where things differ from before.

As Postman argues, when a society’s main information channel is entertainment-first, serious topics get forced into entertainment formats. The result isn’t “lies” so much as trivialization: even true things get processed as, and optimized for, content.

I believe that the “content-ification” of everything has resulted in a few things:

Everything is a performance. Across most public domains, the payoff to performance rises: more of life is staged, recorded, and judged through mobile perception. Our personal lives can be thought of as moments to be captured. Our profiles can be evaluated based on the perceptions of others. The media we consume is likely optimized for memorability and “vibes”, instead of depth and genuine coherence.

Truth is heavily decontextualized. News, statistics, and general entertainment increasingly arrives as decontextualized fragments of a whole; urgency and speed of delivery is rewarded (monetarily, see TMZ) while comprehension and accuracy becomes less common and more unevenly distributed. When grabbing and holding attention trumps substance and clarity, we can feel informed while becoming less able to explain causes, tradeoffs, or history. A worldview can be formed, strictly composed of soundbites. 

The public becomes less capable of sustained seriousness. I really don’t know if people are becoming more dumb than they were before (I’ve seen studies showing no negative consequence, but I am concerned about the impact of short-form content, based on anecdotal evidence), but because the dominant medium trains a different kind of mind (micro-pattern recognition and emotional responses), a low tolerance for boredom is created.  Serious things, when not “content-ified” can become boring in comparison, and I believe this is detrimental to a society that wishes to progress.

We have confident but unformed opinions on everything. Lots of opinions but less ability to defend them rigorously. More “feelings about issues,” less philosophy, history, and serious moral reasoning.

The net effect is a higher cost of seriousness: sustained attention, standards, and principled disagreement become harder to maintain at scale. We’re less likely to seriously spend our time, we’re less likely to seriously decide what is valuable or important to us, we’re less likely to seriously have the courage to be wrong about something, and we’re less likely to seriously set standards and quality thresholds that exclude some views or behaviors as worse, for fear of backlash from the global village.

If McLuhan’s reversal theory holds, we should expect certain benefits to invert past a saturation point; the question is where that threshold sits and who benefits. I believe we’re seeing this reversal right now, particularly with mobile devices and social networks:

  • “More connection” has become  loneliness, mistrust, and tribalism
  • “More information” has become less knowledge, and more reactionary
  • “More personalization” has become a form of ‘sameness’ via algorithmic convergence within groups / subcultures

These reversals are the basis for my first bet: Gravitas. Within this framework, gravitas refers to anything that attempts to be of an original posture, approaches something with intentionality, and values truth or authenticity.

Indicators:

I believe there are potentially cyclical or regional fluctuations to these concepts as well. Conversations around misinformation tends to spike around elections, pandemics, or crises, prompting short-term surges in fact-checking and public responses. Third spaces may see rises and falls based on a given city’s cost of living or net increase/decrease in population. However, each cycle leaves society more aware of the issues, gradually ratcheting up a baseline demand for increased connection and reliable provenance.

When nobody knows what’s real, anything that delivers authenticity (such as irl events + identity-based gatherings) or truth becomes valuable. In summary, my gravitas bet is a bet that the coming years will see more offline communities, varying methods of verification or truth-seeking, and authentic / ideology-based groups becoming something of substantial value and potentially a competitive advantage for businesses.

Discernment

“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” – T.S. Eliot

It’d be impossible to talk about the future without bringing up artificial intelligence and the impact it will have on the world. What intrigues me the most about AI isn’t the output, productivity gains, or intentions for how it’s used, but the environment in which it’s used and how human and societal incentives are intertwined.

One could argue, that on average, humans care about some form of attention, status, coordination, and trust. Which of these does AI reward? Whenever new technology is introduced, a small subset of the population sets out to become “masters”, and these masters end up demanding attention, status, coordination, and trust. Examples:

  • Print elites = writers, editors, scholars, lawyers
  • TV elites = producers, entertainers, hosts, anchors
  • Social elites = creators, influencers, algorithm / attention-hackers
  • AI-era elites = ???

I think we focus a lot on what AI is “good at”, and not as much on what AI as a medium rewards within the human condition. How does one become fluent in its grammar, as opposed to its content? 

This leads me to my second bet: Discernment

When AI increases the speed of production while driving down costs, it will lead to near infinite output of everything; everything will become saturated, including insights. What makes a good AI analyst? What makes a good AI content creator? What makes a good AI SDR? Each discipline and each domain has its own set of metrics that have historically determined good and bad. Similar to the scientific method, in business, you have hypotheses and test them. You continuously run variations of hypotheses to test which approach maximizes or minimizes whichever metric is deemed the determining factor of success. AI has the ability to run an infinite number of hypotheses, simultaneously, at a much lower cost than it would be to have a human run a fraction of them. What’s the result? More output, more numbers, more insights, etc. It appears to me as if the “message” of AI is production.

When the message is production, and the cost of production of such items drops to near-zero, the value (and accountability) migrates from the producer to the editor/adjudicator (“everyone’s a critique”, for real). Discernment is the ability to stake your reputation on a decision, and whoever can make good decisions, blending taste + judgment + accountability, will master the AI medium and demand attention, status, coordination, and trust. 

What does this look like in practice? Something that removes choices, collapses ambiguity, and tells people what to or what not to look at. Something that enforces decisions and resolves all options and conflicts.

Indicators:

  • What is Truth? We are witnessing a clash of old, linear truth-finding through experts and editors with the new, instantaneous, crowdsourced community notes. If you have access to community notes on X, you’ll see people fighting over what the truth is, and what context distills truth. AI is becoming proposed as part of the solution by acting as a real-time sense-making assistant (sorting truth from falsehood in milliseconds), redesigning our institutions (education, media, governance) for an age where information is instantaneous, non-deterministic, and is sometimes entirely incorrect. Enter prediction markets: moving from niche experimentation to mainstream financial infrastructure, markets such as Polymarket have processed over $10.8 billion in transactions this year. If there was any greater indicator, outside of trading volume, Polymarket reached a $9 billion valuation as well, backed by a $2 billion investment from the parent company of the NYSE. Prediction markets can be viewed as somewhat of a “crystal ball”; if you truly believed something with all your heart, it’d be easy to put money on it – if there’s money on the ground, pick it up! Prediction markets have become a “truth-seeking” rail, with markets covering politics, sports, and music.
  • Taste. If there was a buzzword that dominated tech conversations in 2025, it was “taste”. “In a world where everyone uses the same AI tools, taste becomes the critical differentiator. Creativity in the AI era will rely less on executing tasks and more on infusing work with feeling, context, and taste.” Not only is taste bleeding into human tasks, it’s a core foundation for model development itself. The Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) market is a $6 billion market, estimated to grow at a CAGR of 16% through 2032, driven by the "critical need for safe, reliable, and human-aligned AI". This means that AI doesn’t just need human-reinforcement for model training to help the AI solve problems or execute tasks, but it needs human-reinforcement to help the AI solve problems and execute tasks in a way a human would. Human judgement, human discernment, and human taste is a notable, lacking quality in most models (not just LLMs) today.
  • Smart Contracts. Smart contracts are jurisprudence in code. Their adoption expresses a collective move toward instantaneous, trustless adjudication, especially in systems where traditional law is slow, biased, or jurisdictionally irrelevant. As AI agents begin to coordinate and engage in commerce with each other, trusted, third party adjudicators and technological rails for trust become important; smart contracts and agentic protocols fill that gap. When analyzing the number of smart contracts deployed on Ethereum in 2016 (123,376) to 2025 (69,788,231), there’s been a 566x increase, with average monthly smart contract deployments rising from ~55,326 in December 2023 to ~267,798 by December 2025, a 120% CAGR. In an increasingly non-deterministic, high-output world of agents, instantaneous and codified sets of rules and outcomes will become more important than ever.

In an era of infinite choices and rampant ambiguity, the ability to adjudicate – to swiftly and correctly decide what is true or what action to take – becomes valuable. Value will accrue to those who can tune out frenzy and ascertain the reality, or to those who build the tools that enable others to do the same at scale. “Discernment” here implies both the judgment of truth and the quality of decisiveness. The rise of AI has supercharged content creation and data analysis, but humans and institutions still face verification bottlenecks (AI said it, but is it true?) and decision paralysis (AI can produce infinite sets of opportunities/ideas). I bet that in an age of infinite information and optionality, the economic return on the 'final decision' will skyrocket because the cost of being wrong is higher than ever.

Reality

“The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences.” — Winston Churchill

Apologies for what might seem as a carbon-copy of Dalio, but I can’t help but come to the same conclusion.

After WWII, the historically powerful countries of the world were decimated. Millions of working-age men were dead, villages and cities destroyed, entire industries depleted, and political ideologies debated across all of the major powers. The USA found itself in a very unique position. Yes, it was coming out of the Great Depression, but it didn’t have nearly the same types of problems, nor the same severity of problems, as the rest of the world. Already on the rise, this enabled the USA to take over the spotlight and become a global superpower (I’m over-simplifying a lot). We invested in industries, produced many goods, and had a strong military. This resulted in a strong currency, incentivizing further investment, and so on…

But in 1971 we did something that forever changed the course of the American economy; the U.S. suspended gold convertibility; the dollar became fully fiat – no longer redeemable for gold at a fixed rate. Its ‘backing’ was now institutional: taxation capacity, legal tender status, and credibility of the state and central bank. This removed an external convertibility constraint and expanded policy flexibility. Over time, that flexibility has tended to favor debt expansion and asset-price sensitivity. Why? When financing constraints are softened or removed, political systems have historically, and pretty reliably, chosen more spending and more leverage than they would under hard constraints. In other words, the US Treasury had the greenlight make the money printer go ‘brrrrr’, because we no longer needed to have the required levels of gold reserves to back dollars for future exchange. Since then, our debt-GDP ratio has skyrocketed, our currency is increasingly debased, and our global currency reserve status has been slowly deteriorating (debatable). I’ve oversimplified things a lot here…there’s a difference between fiscal dominance and monetary policy, CPI and asset inflation, reserve currency status vs domestic purchasing power, and constraint (politics) vs capability (printing). But is the USA still dominant? Most metrics point to ‘yes’, however, I believe the elements of decline create a strong argument. 

We’re at an interesting point in time where many are calling these elements of decline out publicly. “Make America Great Again”, means different things to different people, but the existence of the slogan implies the existence of awareness of some form of decline. Can the USA turn the ship around? Can we reverse the trajectory we’re currently on? I’m not sure, but I know we’ll try.

This is the basis for my third bet: Reality

I believe we’ll see more volatility, more geopolitical risk, more industrial policy (reshoring, subsidies, tariffs), and more defense + security spend. When countries are desperate to prevent power-loss, history shows money is concentrated in the following areas:

  • Defense tech / dual-use technology = ISR, cyber, supply chain security, drones
  • Energy security = grid reliability, nuclear and gas infrastructure, critical minerals
  • Domestic manufacturing enablers = automation, robotics, industrial software
  • Insurance / risk transfer = specialty insurance, catastrophe modeling

When shit hits the fan, things get ‘real’. It’s the real stuff that dictates the trajectory and strength of our country’s economy (although not necessarily its currency). By real I mean the basics: food, water, energy, and defense. The major differences between now and historical attempts are that we are experiencing one of the greatest technological revolutions (AI) while participating in a global and digital economy. I don’t think this changes the outcomes, but only the speed and severity of volatility; dramatic responses (in both directions) via information highways.

Indicators:

  • Defense and Security Spending. There was a notable shift in many countries’ spending targets after recent geopolitical conflicts. Global military expenditure hit a record ~$2.7 trillion in 2025, reflecting the largest annual increase in the last 3 decades. The US, for instance, passed large appropriation increases for defense and for technologies labeled as “strategic.” There are early signs of growth here: defense and aerospace firms have seen backlogs rise with new orders, and venture capital is flowing into defense tech startups (e.g. companies focusing on AI, drones, and cybersecurity for the DoD). Over time, an increase in the number of new defense contractors or startups, and faster adoption of cutting-edge tech by the Pentagon, would indicate the U.S. is successfully marshaling its industrial base.
  • Energy / Infra. Domestic oil & gas production, renewable energy capacity buildout, nuclear energy investments, and grid reliability metrics; the core of this “reality” pivot. There's been a boom in EV battery plants, solar panel factories, and wind farms. Utility-scale renewable capacity saw record growth in 2023–24 (analysts estimate a ~25% jump in annual installations), and utilities have revised plans to add dozens of gigawatts more wind and solar than previously expected, taking advantage of IRA incentives. On the fossil fuel side, US oil and gas production remains robust: Oil production in the US has continued to hit record highs this year, rising to 44,000 barrels per day during the month to a record 13.84 million bpd, according to EIA data. Another indicator is a renewed interest in nuclear energy. For the first time in decades, new nuclear reactors are coming online in the US: Plant Vogtle’s Unit 3 in Georgia started operation in 2023, the first newly built reactor in 30+ years, with Unit 4 close behind. Additionally, federal programs are funding small modular reactor (SMR) designs, VC dollars are pouring into different parts of the nuclear supply chain, such as General Matter, the startup taking on the plutonium enrichment bottleneck, and AI continues to demand record-levels of energy, which are, in my opinion, best supported by nuclear energy.
  • Manufacturing and Supply Chain Relocation. The bet implies a reversal (or at least a halt) of extreme globalization. Since 2021, the US has seen a few signs of a manufacturing revival. On one hand, their hands are tied due to heavy tariffs from Trump, on the other hand, there appears to be both private and public investment accelerating the change. In fact, private construction spending on manufacturing facilities has roughly tripled in just a few years, from around $75 billion in 2021 to about $225 billion by late 2023;  an unprecedented surge to record levels. Even after adjusting for inflation, manufacturing construction spending by early 2024 was more than double its pre-pandemic levels. What’s happening in employment? Roughly 800,000 manufacturing jobs were added in the US from early 2021 to early 2024, with many of these jobs are in areas like the Midwest and Southeast, such as Ohio receiving with Intel’s $20 billion fab investment, and Michigan securing new battery and EV parts plants.

The Reality bet is driven by both secular forces and cyclical triggers. Secularly, it reflects the end of a unique post-Cold War period. From roughly 1990 to 2020, much of the world enjoyed relative geopolitical calm (no global world wars), hyper-globalization (increasingly open / efficient trade routes), and macroeconomic tailwinds (falling interest rates / stableish inflation). This enabled a focus on intangible growth – software, finance, services – while neglecting “boring” physical industries. However, I think secular trends have shifted: the rise of China as a peer competitor, climate change pressures on resources, and technological maturation (AI requires more power/resources to deploy at scale) all demand a more grounded approach. We may be entering a multi-decade era of strategic competition similar to a new Cold War, which elevates defense and industrial policy to the surface. Similarly, secular demographic trends (aging populations) put focus on productivity which potentially requires robotics and automation tying into domestic manufacturing pushes.

Hard Money

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.” – Francis Bacon

This is where I might really lose most people. I had a hard time articulating my thoughts and a fair amount of this analysis was rooted in anecdotal evidence and “vibes”, leading to more “jumps-to-conclusions" than I’d like in an argument, but it is what it is. 

People hate billionaires. I don’t personally, but I understand why people do. Millions of people can’t afford rent, groceries, the ability to take care of themselves and their children, and are unable to afford a home. It’s impossible for many people to save, because they’re living paycheck to paycheck, and the little that is saved is hardly accumulating any interest. In a world like that, long-term investments and 30+ year time horizons are much less attractive (yes they’ve always been, but I believe they are even more so now than ever) than riskier, short-term investments, and as we’re witnessing now, literal gambling. Billions of dollars are being poured into extremely risky markets with hopes of making a quick buck. This isn’t new at all by the way; get rich quick schemes and betting have been around forever. What I believe is different than before is the “why”. 

Particularly within Gen Z, I’m witnessing a nihilistic approach to life, where nothing matters, so you might as well do everything you can to get rich and have zero shame in doing so. This can appear in various formats, such as: live streaming violent pranks on Twitch to go viral, engagement farming or rage-baiting on social media to earn payouts, or rugpulling + pump and dump schemes in the crypto markets. 

Nothing matters, just get the bag one way or another. There’s no such thing as shame or embarrassment, just get the bag one way or another. Attention is all you need.

The underlying theme here is that when it’s hard for somebody to participate in society or participate in an economy, they will have little interest in doing so, and will turn to alternative sources of income and alternative sources of attention, those of which are riskier and less regulated. 

Where does this lead? Below are a few predictions, pulling on the three previous analyses and bets:

Regulation and surveillance grows. Age gating, identity verification, payment restrictions, and platform liability. We’ve seen it already with the Online Safety Act; governments will step in and enforce surveillance under the guise of protecting people from themselves. Although these new regulations seem harmless, they enable the foundations of social credit scores and state surveillance of all financial transactions, diminishing an individual’s right to privacy and diminishing individual liberty. I think these regulations will impact the shared, social spaces we currently enjoy.

Regulations/surveillance + AI will reinforce the reversal to “seriousness”. Following a flood of AI-generated content and harsh online regulations, online life will begin to feel hollow and people will look for an escape. People will pay for identity, community, discipline, and embodied life. We’ll see the return of clubs rooted in ideology, communities with high standards and values, more products enabling self-discipline and accountability, and new forms of education and apprenticeship. As society continues to “amuse itself to death”, competence becomes rare, leaving a wide-open opportunity to gain a competitive edge: reading primary sources, writing, reasoning probabilistically, and executing consistently. That combination is increasingly scarce and provides younger people with extreme leverage in any market in the near-term. In the long-term, we’ll see these habits become productized and executed at scale with AI.

Money will change. AI and tech bubbles will burst, recessions will decimate regions, and yet the gap between the haves and have-nots will continue to widen. How is that possible? The infinite money machine artificially props up assets and destroys savings. Equities rise while the currency falls. Those with the means to purchase equities (the haves) ride the wave, those without the means to purchase equities (the have-nots) are destroyed by inflation, never able to catch up. The problem won’t be that we can’t produce enough goods or create enough jobs, the problem won’t be that we won’t have a strong enough military to enforce our reserve currency, the problem won’t be that we won’t have intelligent and innovative minds to foster extreme economic growth, the problem will be that our money is fundamentally broken. In econ 101 you learn about the 3 principles of a good money: medium of exchange, unit of account, and a store of value. The US Dollar is 2 of those things: a medium of exchange and a unit of account. It is not a store of value. As the average person and institutions look to solve the major wealth inequality problem of the country, they will be forced to look at our currency as the culprit, the money itself is the problem. This isn’t an endorsement for Bitcoin, Silver, or Gold specifically, but I do believe institutions will look to some form of hard money for store of value out of pure necessity.

That leaves me with my fourth and final bet: Hard Money.

Indicators:

  • Inflation. A core indicator is the inflation rate (CPI or similar measures) and the trajectory of currency purchasing power. Inflation spiked to multi-decade highs in 2021–2022 across many countries, cutting into the real value of fiat savings. A leading indicator for Hard Money momentum is persistent above-target inflation or volatile inflation expectations. If consumers and investors stop trusting central banks to maintain 2% inflation (for example) and start expecting higher inflation long-term, that mindset shift will boost demand for inflation hedges found in hard money.
  • Debt. The US now has a debt of about 6× its annual revenue, and net interest costs are ~20% of revenue (over $1 trillion annually), a situation some economists describe as unsustainable without either default, austerity, or more printing. I know people have been saying this for years and nothing has happened (I mean, look at Japan), but another indicator (specifically for the US) is when the bond market starts revolting. Rising yields on government bonds even as growth slows, indicates investors demand a risk premium for possible inflation/default. This happened in 2022–2023 (US 10-year yields rose above 4% despite some recession fears), and those kinds of yield surges relative to inflation show declining trust in long-term monetary stability.
  • Metals and Cryptocurrency Demand. Gold and Silver prices hitting record highs (in nominal and importantly in real or alternative-currency terms) signals eroding faith in fiat. Central bank purchases of gold are an especially telling indicator, as these are the institutions managing fiat, yet even they have been diversifying. In 2025, global central banks and governments are on track to purchase approximately 900 tonnes of gold. This follows a record-breaking multi-year trend where central banks have bought over 1,000 tonnes annually since 2022. A similar story is happening with cryptocurrencies, especially Bitcoin, which experienced its all time high in 2025 at a price of $126,210. Established by President Trump via executive order in March 2025, the USA now has a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve (SBR) to hold Bitcoin as a national reserve asset, a major step forward in diversifying the country’s assets away from fiat. What also interests me here is our policies are starting to bend towards cryptocurrencies as well, on behalf of the establishment of the Crypto Task Force, as part of the SEC, who are focused on establishing clear regulatory lines, providing registration pathways, and taking enforcement actions against fraud in the crypto space.

I truly believe that the shift towards hard money represents a secular shift. The younger generations see housing, education, and assets out of reach unless they gamble or speculate, leading to the nihilistic/get the bag mentality I see increasing amongst my peers. Do I think the shift will happen overnight? Not at all, people have been bullish on Bitcoin replacing USD since 2010, and if the world is going to experience some sort of shared panic (heightened military  pressure between US/China paired with decreased globalization, etc) the US dollar could rapidly strengthen as everyone flees to its relative safety (the dollar milkshake theory). That could postpone the reckoning for the dollar until later (maybe 5+ years out) when things stabilize and inflation erodes it quietly. So short-term, the dollar could moonshot (especially if other currencies fail first, e.g. a euro or yen crisis could make USD look good in comparison). But I think these will be short-term swings on a secular trajectory of erosion in fiat credibility.

In summary, these are trends I’m noticing today:

  • Short-form + payouts = attention is viewed as currency
  • Polarization = conflict is fuel for more attention
  • Rise of Nihilism = scarcity of sound fundamentals
  • Cognitive decay = scarcity of competence and decisiveness
  • US decline = volatility + premium of real things
  • Bad money = new rails to bad risky, alternative places to put money
  • Always-on social visibility = performativity is replacing harsh judgment

In each domain, scarcity at the extremes becomes the driver of value; ownership of these scarce products/systems/etc is important. I think the key to personal/professional monetary gain will reside in becoming somebody who sits above degraded attention (depth), below volatile systems (human-aligned foundations), and outside performative culture (authentic).

This correction will unfortunately be painful for a lot of those with nearsightedness. Value will be destroyed where it was falsely propped up (the “attention economy”) and it will emerge where fundamentals have been undervalued. 

Things I’ll avoid:

  • Attention economy companies with zero defensibility
  • Narrative-dependent assets

Things I’ll watch closely:

  • Seriousness. Things people turn to when they need certainty.
  • Judgement. Tools that help filter information and aid decisions.
  • Real stuff. The “boring” stuff.
  • Hard money. Silver, gold, and Bitcoin.

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