The new oil is ideas it's all digital all the new fortunes are being created in idea space in fact if you're starting out today as a young ambitious person you don't learn real estate you don't learn coal and oil mining you don't go into extraction of physical resources to create wealth you go into idea space you go into programming books movies blogs and podcasts and building robots which are mostly intellectual property underneath i would focus on the content creator side of things because i believe that's where the puck is going that's a much more important shift in how we all consume information content and are entertained i really tend to believe as you've probably gotten a sense of sort of patterns and probabilities and if you said to meth probabilistically answer where are we going in apps and social experiences what i would say is lex we spent the first decade building platforms and getting them to scale and if you want to think about it again back to sort of this poker analogy others mistakes minus your mistakes is the value well the value that was captured was trillions of dollars essentially to apple and to google and they did that by basically attracting billions of monthly active users to their platform then this next wave were the apps facebook qq10 tick tock twitter snapchat that whole panoply of apps and interestingly they were in many ways an atomized version of the platforms right they sat on top of them they were an ecosystem participant but the value they created was the same trillions of dollars of enterprise value billions of monthly active users. Well there's an interesting phenomenon that's kind of hiding in plain sight which is that the next most obvious atomic unit are content creators now let me give you two examples lex friedman this random crazy guy mr beast you know jimmy donaldson just the two of you alone added up.

Okay. And you guys are going to approach in the next five years a billion people the only thing that you guys haven't figured out yet is how to capture trillions of dollars of value now maybe you don't want to. And maybe that's not your statement. Right. But let's just look at mr beast alone because he is trying to do exactly that probably. Yeah. And i think jimmy is going to build an enormous business. But if you take jimmy and all of the other content creators right you guys are atomizing what the apps have done you're providing your own curated news feeds you're providing your own curated communities you're allowed you let people move in and out of these things in a very lightweight way and value is accruing to you so the honest answer to your question is i would focus on the content creator side of things because i believe that's where the puck is going that's a much more important shift in how we all consume information content and are entertained it's through brands like you individual people that we can humanize and understand are the filter like we get into this model of i must work for other people work my way up the ladder i must like do what that person is doing to make money but really today in society you get rewarded for creative work for creating something brand new that society didn't even know yet that it wanted it doesn't know how to get other than through you so the most powerful money makers are actually individual brands people like yourself or elon or kanye or oprah or trump right these are individual brands eponymous name brands who themselves are leveraged like you're leveraged you have podcast media going out to everybody that's leveraged the podcast work for you when you sleep they have knowledge that nobody else has which is your knowledge is the knowledge of being joe rogan i mean who else is a ufc fighter and a commentator and a podcaster and a comedian and you know interested in all these things and knows all these people can't replace you so we have to pay you what you're worth and it was i never fought in the ufc. Though. Oh you didn't. Okay. Sorry or you know whatever you're involved in that whole scene you just have a unique set of skill sets so because of this unique what i call specific knowledge because of the accountability that you have with your name because the leverage that you have through your media you're a money making machine you're like i'm sure at this point i could make you start over tomorrow wipe out your bank account you'd be rich again in no time because you have all the skill sets so once people have those skill sets and the beauty is the way you've done it is you don't have any competition there's no substitution if joe rogan were to disappear off the air tomorrow it's not like random podcaster number 12 would step in and fill that thing. No it's just gone so the way to get out of that competition trap is actually to be authentic the way to retire is actually to find the thing that you know how to do better than anybody. And you know how to do that better anyway because you love to do it no one can compete with you if you love to do it be authentic and then figure out how to map that to what society actually wants apply some leverage put your name on it. So you take the risks but you gain the rewards have ownership and equity in what you do. And then just crank it out then new oil is ideas it's all digital all the new fortunes are being created in idea space in fact if you're starting out today as a young ambitious person you don't learn real estate you don't learn coal and oil mining you don't go into extraction of physical resources to create wealth you go into idea space you go into programming books movies blogs and podcasts and building robots which are mostly intellectual property underneath so even as a human civilization we're moving away from conquest to physical resources and moving much more into trading of ideas i think four or five years from now there's gonna be a lot of articles about creators who are you know you will there will be billionaire creators right a handful of them.

You know. Yeah you'l just start seeing it more and more and more the direct to consumer with your influence especially with the data darkness thing that's going on with like you can't track right. Yeah it used to be really easy to just easy to find audiences it's not as easy to find it if you don't have it can you explain that the date of darkness basically. Yeah you could track people you know you could facebook collected everything so if you want if you had a widget. And you wanted to find people who would want to buy that widget it was pretty easy because they give you all the data and they say i love widgets and here's my birthday and here are the other things i like it's really easy to find those audience now with the data darkness where you can't be tracked and stuff and cookie policy it's hard to find those people.

And so i was always like i cannot believe brands pay me as much as they do to do these integrations you know before i had my own business and now that i have my own business i'm like those sobs were ripping me off. Oh you know what i mean it's like when you have your own audience and your own company you can pitch then it's like oh like. Yeah. I was making them more money than they were paying me and they you know what i mean. And then and sometimes the other thing with like well it didn't perform as well as we wanted it's like no dude i know that's not true now you know this is the kind of entrepreneurship or product market fit flipped on its head where you know previously someone would create crunch labs they would say.

Okay i have these i want to teach kids how to engineer now i need to go find an audience for them. But now it's the inverse where it's. Hey i have this massive audience interested in building and engineering let me build a company around that premise which is which is i think why we're heading towards billionaire. Yeah. Creators i agree what's the best thing to start doing on youtube whatever you love whatever gets you excited gets you out of the bed in the morning that's the type of videos you should be making what are you genuinely curious and passionate about i mean people on youtube get views for like the strangest things you know what i mean like i bet you if we like there's someone who's making a living painting bowling balls i don't know. But like you know there's this one board game i love playing. And i was you know watching a tutorial watching some videos on it's like not even that popular of a board game and the guy making the videos was like a school teacher and like in one of the videos he mentioned how his channel on just this simple board game was doing so well that he was able to like quit his job as a teacher. And he went full time making videos about this board game you know what i mean. And that's like that's one of those things where like you know if he was being over analytical people would be like don't make videos on a board game who cares about that board game. But it's what he loved. And it's what he was passionate about and so that pushed him to grind and putting the effort. And you know he found an audience and some. Yeah. My answer is make videos on whatever you love and you'l make it a lot further it's the same thing like don't you know people say don't do youtube for money and the thing is it's not like wanting money isn't gonna cause you to fail but if that's your focus it's like i mean set aside money related videos like graham stephen or stefan and all them. But it's just if that's your focus you're not gonna put in as many hours. And you're not gonna obsess as much than if it was something that you genuinely did as a hobby and loved creating reflections another perspective that i have found very useful is from alex ormosi he argues that just like in the past fortunes were made on oil today's fortunes are made on attention since anyone can build an audience thanks to the infinite leverage of the internet and you build an audience by being authentic to yourself by doing what you love and pursuing your genuine curiosity and that will naturally bring you authentic ideas which then you can package in a digital format to then be consumed by anyone on the internet who enjoys your ideas and your work in my opinion this is why navarro account and alex hermosi have said that ideas and attention are the new oil because once you have an audience and the attention it is relatively easy to monetize through ads revenue brand deals and affiliate marketing or even create your own business which could solve the most common need of your audience and you wouldn't have to spend a penny on marketing.