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i watched babylon the movie recently and i was shocked by how rural beverly hills in california looked in 1920.

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all this wealth was created in only the past 100 years. it’s hard to imagine california going away, but it’s also hard to imagine it growing by anything close to what it did over the past 100 years.

i’m sure the entertainment industry in california went through multiple booms and busts. as well as major paradigm shifts (e.g. silent -> audio, studio-led to talent-let to streaming-led).

but ultimately the whole trend was up and to the right: los angeles was becoming the entertainment capital of the world.

being focused on technology, i realized that i was often stuck looking at the leaves and not the tree. twitter trends (chatgpt, ftx) and not the bigger story of where we’re headed.

all of this was catalyzed by me asking someone close to me how they see the world evolving. she asked me back. it forced me to put to words what i thought.

  • money goes into the internet (20 years)
    • 2018-2022 gave so much more traction to cryptocurrencies and the ability to move money around natively in the internet without the traditional intermediaries. in 2018, it wasn’t clear this would happen this quickly. this to me is as clear as the beverly hills in 1920 going from farmland to the most expensive real estate in the world by 2020. yes, ftx and luna were terrible outcomes, but they’re nothing in the larger story of money going internet-native. in fact, how the government handled covid and the central bank from 2018-2022 vastly accelerated the digital asset adoption curve (imo ~10 years). this is a very exciting time for crypto commodities.
  • higher quality niche content (10 years)
    • yes, influencers and youtubers are making money and they’ll make more, but this is only the beginning. everything we think of will get a high quality searchable video result within months of popular concern. we will evolve from entertainment to curated information. i’ve noticed a trend of the type of content/creator that is popular evolving rapidly. we went from tiktok dancers and fake gurus to high quality niche information in whatever realm you want to learn. we ain’t seen nothing yet. anything you want to think about will be made into high quality content that gives us passive doses of information for their influence to be able to sell you more things. don’t hate the game, the early attempts could be cringe, but this is inevitable.
  • affordable housing and collapse of the real estate ponzi (40 years)
    • as housing price measured in multiples of annual earnings and annual savings increases to historical highs, people will rethink if a traditional house in a traditional area will be worth being a ~wage slave for 30 years of their life. as higher quality niche content traverses its way to higher ticket price items such as finding new cities entirely (not just the usuals of la/sf/miami/nyc/austin/seattle with tech offices) as well as technologies to build tiny homes + improve existing cheap homes, a new manifest destiny will emerge as a new hopeful and proactive cohort start developing high quality but unpopular land/homes all around the US and the world.
  • self-consciousness -> self-actualization (40 years)
    • as the jungian collective unconscious is developing at lightspeed with the advent of the internet, social media and digital content, we will experience the evolution of the collective unconscious at breakneck speeds from lower brain experiences to the highest. starting from the limbic system up to the prefrontal cortex and maybe even higher zones that we are not scientifically aware of. over the next 10-20 years, that may stand out in forms of reduced importance on vanity and prestige over focus on self-actualization, doing, curiosity, deep connection. this is already showing early signs of traction through: meditation, DIY, vanlife, remote nomading, return of the flip phone, … etc. things are about to get weirder, nicher and unapologetically themselves. and this is a wonderful vague thing that will continue to get crisper over time.

super raw thoughts, but wanted to time stamp this and get back in the habit of sharing ideas out in the open.

what a crazy, absurd, fun time to be alive. let’s buckle up and enjoy the ride

p.s. thanks A for inspiring this convo.