Morning Vibes With Dr. Jerry - the First
Hello and welcome to
#MorningVibesWithDrJerryTheFirst-Episode 303
Title: Three Trends
for the Next 50 Years
What you are about to listen to is a wonderful write
up by James Altucher and voiced over by Dr. Jerry - the First Oguzie
I’m not a big believer in the future. I mean, it will exist—we
know that. But that’s about it.
CXO Advisory Group has analyzed the predictions of hundreds of
pundits.
Are the talking heads on TV right or wrong?
You know, the ones who say Ebola will end the world, or the ones
who said Enron was just having accounting problems.
It turns out the pundits’ predictions are right only 47% of the
time.
I think they are being nice to the pundits. I would say pundits
are right about 12% of the time.
But I pulled that number out of a hat, and they did a statistical
study, so who knows?
I don’t like making predictions. They get in the way of my
digestion. All of that future thinking clogs up the pipes.
But there’s a great way to evaluate whether a prediction is true
or not. It involves a simple phrase we all know: “This time things will be
different.”
We know that phrase is always wrong. We know that things stay the
same.
I’ll give a great example: my 15-year-old doesn’t have email. She
doesn’t really use a computer except for homework. But she does use her phone.
She texts everyone.
Email has been popular for almost 20 years. But the phone has been
popular for over 100 years.
Not that new things are bad. We’re not using the phone from the
year 1900. We’re using a phone that is a more powerful computer than the top
supercomputers from 20 years ago, and it fits into our pocket.
Two things happen:
what was popular in the past will be popular for at least as long
in the future (expect at least another 100 years of teenage girls texting
relationship advice to their friends); and
what was popular in the past will improve.
I have this experience as a pundit for the future:
In 2007 I said on CNBC that Facebook would one day be worth $100
billion.
At the time it was worth maybe $1 billion.
Everyone on the show laughed.
I then invested in every Facebook services provider I could find.
Then, 5 years later almost to the day... it hit the world and
Facebook has been on a meteoritic rise since then
So what are the
three trends that would turn our world upside down in the next 50 years?
Trend
#1: Deflation
Most people are scared to death of
inflation.
If most people are scared of
something (like Ebola), it probably means it was a media or marketing-manufactured
fear that will never come true.
The reality is, we live in a
deflationary world.
Warren Buffett has said
that deflation is much more scary than inflation.
It’s scary to him because he sells
stuff.
It’s great for everyone else
because we buy things. However, to be fair, it’s a mixed bag.
When prices go down, people wait to
buy, because prices might be cheaper later.
This is why some of the scariest
points in our economic history were in the 1930s and in 2009 when there was
deflation.
How did the government solve the
problem?
By printing money and going to war.
That’s how scary it was.
To solve the problem, we gave
18-year-old kids guns, sent them to another country, and told them to shoot
other 18-year-olds.
People have all sorts of statistics
about the government debt and the dollar decreasing 97% in value since 1913,
etc.
I don’t care about all of that. I
want to make money no matter what.
Here’s what I see:
my computers are cheaper.
Housing prices haven’t gone up in
10 years.
And people are finally starting to
realize that paying for higher education isn’t worth as much as it used to be
(too much student loan debt and not enough jobs).
All electricity is cheaper.
All books are cheaper.
And I don’t have to go to the
movies to watch a movie.
All my music is basically free if I
watch it on YouTube.
Don’t get me wrong: inflation
exists because the government and the corporations that run it are preventing
deflation.
But the natural order of things is to deflate.
Eventually something bad will
happen, and the carpet will be pulled out from under everyone. Perhaps if we
have an inflationary bubble. Then deflation will hit hard, and you have to
be prepared.
In a deflationary world, ideas are
more valuable than products.
If you have ideas that can help
people improve their businesses, then you will make a lot of money.
For instance, I
know one person who was sleeping on his sister’s couch until he started showing
people how to give webinars to improve their businesses. Now he makes seven
figures a year.
This “webinar trick” won’t always work. But then he’ll have ideas
for the next way to help people.
Ideas are the
currency of the 21st century, and their value is inflating, not deflating.
Trend #2: Chemistry
The last 50 years was the “IT half-century,” starting with the
invention of the computer, the widespread use of home computers, and then the
domination of the Internet and mobile phones.
Okay. Done.
It’s not like innovation will stop in that area. It won’t.
Every year computers will get better, more apps will be useful,
etc. But the greatest innovations are over for now (DNA computing will happen,
but not until after what I’m about to say does).
As an example: the next versions of my laptop and my cellphone
have already come out.
But, for the first time ever, I have no real need to get them. And
I’m an upgrade addict.
But the upgrades just weren’t big enough.
I don’t even think I understand the differences between the next
generation of cellphones and last year’s generation (tiny changes in battery
and pixel numbers, but only tiny).
Here’s what’s
going to change: chemistry.
The number of graduate students in chemistry is at an all-time low
versus the number of graduate students in computer science or information
technology.
And yet, we’re at a point where almost everything we do requires
advances in chemistry rather than IT.
For instance, Elon Musk is creating a billion-dollar factory to
make batteries.
Well, for Elon’s sake, wouldn’t it be better if we had a more
efficient way to use lithium so that batteries can last longer?
DNA computing, while it would create a great advance in computer
technology, is almost 100% dependent on advances in biochemistry.
Many people call the US the “Saudi Arabia of Natural Gas.” But
what good does it do us if we can’t convert the gas into liquids that fill up
our car?
Right now every country uses Fischer-Tropsch technology—a chemical
process that is 90 years old—to turn gas into liquids. And it’s expensive to
use it. Wouldn’t it be better if someone could develop a groundbreaking change
here?
I can list 50 problems that chemistry can solve that would make
the world better. But it’s not sexy, so people have stopped studying it. This
will change.
Not because it’s a futurist trend, but because for 3,000 years,
changes in society were largely due to chemistry advances (e.g., harvesting
wheat) rather than computer advances. I’m just taking an old trend and saying,
“Hey, don’t forget about it. We still need it.”
A simple example: DuPont and Dow Chemical, the two largest
chemical companies, have had 50% and 38% year-over-year earnings growth
respectively compared with Apple (12%). But nobody cares.
Trend #3: Employee-free Society
Before 200 years ago, we never really had employees. Then there
was the rise of corporatism, which many confused with capitalism.
I’m on the board of a $1 billion in revenue employment agency.
It's gone from $200 million in revenues to $1 billion just in
the past few years.
Why did we move up so fast when the economy has basically been
flat?
For two reasons:
The Pareto
principle,
which says that 80% of the work is being done by 20% of the
people.
So a lot of people are being fired now, since 2009 gave everyone
the carte blanche excuse.
Regulations that
are too difficult to follow.
It’s getting pretty difficult to figure out what you need to do
with an employee.
Health care is a great example, but there are 1,000 other
examples.
So what’s happening, for better or worse, is a rising wave of
solo-preneurs and lifestyle entrepreneurs—exactly what happened for the
hundreds of years that capitalism was around before stiff and rigid corporatism
(teamed with unions) became the primary but fake “stable” force in our lives.
This is why companies like Uber are flourishing. You have a
workforce (the drivers), logistics software in the middle, and people willing
to pay for that workforce.
Our GDP and our startups are going to start to drift in the Uber
direction. Uber in San Francisco last month did three times as many rides as
all the cab drivers in SF combined.
Corporate life was never really stable, and now we know that.
The problem is: while we were all in our cubicles (and I’ve been
guilty of this for many years as well), we stopped being creative, stopped
having ideas, and just took orders from the gatekeepers: bosses, colleagues,
government, education, family.
We let other people choose what was best for us instead of doing
the choosing ourselves.
If you let
someone else do the choosing for you, the results won’t be good, and you’ll get
resentful. Bad things will happen.
I won't give a direct tock tip on this right here, I do that every
month in my Altucher Report.
This is not about stocks.
It’s about taking an approach where you get your life back so you
can have wealth and abundance over the next 50 years.
One thing to try is to write down 10 ideas a day.
This exercises the idea muscle and gets you 100x more creative
than the average person over time.
They could be business ideas, ideas to help other businesses, book
ideas, or even ideas to surprise your spouse.
Another trick is to take Monday’s ideas and combine them with
Tuesday’s ideas. “Idea sex” is an awesome source of creativity.
Ideas are the
true currency of this next century. I don’t care about the dollar or gold or
health care.
Any movement in those will just create opportunities for people
who know when to take advantage of them.
The key is to become an idea machine.
People say “ideas are a dime a dozen” or “execution is
everything.” These statements are not really true. It’s difficult to come up
with 10 new ideas a day (try it), and execution ideas are just a subset of
ideas.
I was going to make this 10 trends I see coming over the next 10
years. But at 1,900 words, I already shared three solid ones. If you want to
learn the other 7, I explain them in detail and how to make money off of
them in my new book
These trends are already here, they’re already deeply affecting
our society, and being ready for them will be the key to success in the coming
years.
Until I come your way
again, this is #MorningVibesWithDrJerryTheFirst
Keep it coming!!!
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