It's Over for Silicon Valley (But Not For You)

Hey, what's up guys? So in this video, I'm going to talk about why, while it might be over for Silicon Valley when it comes to AI and the capabilities it has, if you are in e-com or do info products, or you are a freelancer or are just really in the world of D2C in general, it is probably just beginning for you and why you should really be aggressively optimistic about what the next 3 years old. Okay, so the reason this video got made is because there was a viral tweet from the co-founder of YouTube maybe a week and a half ago, and he talked about, hey, enjoy your last meaningful year of work. And then that tweet went viral, got over 15 million views. People were freaking out. People who were doomers came in and showed it as proof that work will be meaningless. In the age of AI and AGI, artificial general intelligence. Lots of doom, lots of hype, and a lot of people kind of think or feel this way right now, especially with how fast AI is moving and the capabilities. And there's new models being launched literally every day, it feels like, and new capabilities and use cases and all that good stuff. But the way I would look at this is that it might be over for Silicon Valley, But if you are an everyday entrepreneur, then it really is just beginning, right? But first, let's look at Silicon Valley. And this is like, this is like the bear case. Why would it be over for Silicon Valley? Well, their entire business model really has been built on this premise of creating or building software is hard and expensive. If you think about it, what were they going after? These SaaS products, these hard technical problems that required a lot of computer coding and engineering and a lot of technical knowledge and expertise. So they'd have to go hire some computer engineer, software engineer, pay them $200K, $400K a year, sometimes even more, right? For a rock star, half a million, a million dollars. And that was just for one engineer, right? And then to build these expensive unique, challenging, innovative software or SaaS products, or just, you know, data-driven products, you would need a whole team of software engineers, which meant millions of dollars of payroll, which meant either, you know, getting angel investing at the beginning and giving equity to some of those founding members, and then going and raising money from venture capitalists before you've even shipped anything, right? And so that's been the traditional Silicon Valley model, but AI has indeed changed that because people can build a functional app, uh, in a weekend, right? You can build a little SaaS product, you can build clones of, of, of multi-billion dollar SaaSes in a few hours. Um, and so that moat of software is expensive and that keeps people out, that moat is kind of gone, right? And that has Silicon Valley freaking out. However, if you don't live in that world of Silicon Valley, then things are different, right? If you live in the world that I live in and that most of the people who subscribe to my YouTube channel live, live in, and people who follow me live in and are part of my CA Pro Mastermind live in, right? Then you do, if you do info products or direct response, uh, marketing, you do D2C brands. I have e-com here. This kind of ties into D2C brands. But if you do coaching, if you do freelancing, I'm gonna talk more about that in a minute. There's actually huge opportunities for freelancing, online service-based businesses, agencies, right? All of us. So we don't raise money, we don't have boards, we build offers or funnels or digital brands, and we just sell to real humans. And we're really good at that, right? That's the beauty of direct response. That's why I've loved direct response since I got into that world in 2011. It's like I put out ads, I put out funnels, I put out copy, I put out marketing, to my prospects directly and get them to directly respond, and I generate the lead or I make the sale or whatever it is. Okay, so for us, AI isn't really a threat right now. It's like a supercharger, you know, like we can use AI to complete a sales funnel in a couple of hours instead of a couple of weeks. We can build functional apps without writing any code. We can test 50 angles in the time it used to take to test 5. We can launch info products that combine, you know, expertise that we have plus AI, or frankly just AI's expertise and launch info products for any niche or category and become like, have expert-level content even if we're not an expert on it. And you can run a lean operation that can double your profit margin because you're not having to spend as much money on any of these things, on designers or freelancers or whatever. Now don't worry, 'cause if you're like, well, I'm a freelancer, so look, I'm losing my job. It's like, mm-mm-mm. Ridiculous levels of opportunities for you. And we're going to talk about that on the next slide. But for a business, right, this is what's kind of interesting. Everyone's getting squeezed on Meta, for example, the D2C business owners out there, right? Especially physical products. And there's issues with Meta. I'm kind of over Meta in a lot of ways. But at the same time, yes, you're getting squeezed there, but also your operating expenses should be a fraction of what they were even 6 months ago. So, Maybe we think about that part as well, right? Now, the freelancers. Okay, there are over 30 million small businesses in the US alone. They don't have tech teams, they don't have a CTO, and they're overwhelmed. They're seeing news about AI, they're hearing about job loss and job replacement, and they're like, well, I'm a business owner, but I'm still freaked out about it. If they're on somewhere like X or YouTube where they're seeing constantly announcements about new capabilities and models and everything else, right? They're like, oh my God, I feel behind. I don't know how to keep up. And so if you can come in and help them to implement AI in their business, you have a huge opportunity and you don't have to be a programmer. You just need to understand business problems and you need to understand how to use AI. And if you can do that, you should have more business than you can handle over the next several years. So for you, The window of opportunity is wide open, and I wanna give you a very explicit example about this. Right now I'm building this Agentic AI marketing solution that's available to my CA Pro Mastermind, which is people doing over $3 million a year up to like $300 million plus a year. But we have people different, you know, tiers, I guess. And I'm spending over $40,000 a month on my team of 3 people who are helping to build this agentic stuff, right? Including myself. Uh, their average age is 23 years old. I think one guy might be 25. Uh, and 2 of the 3 have no background at all in computer science. They're just really good with AI. So here we go, paying them, you know, about $40,000 a month to build stuff for me because they're young and smart and they're AI native, right? So wouldn't you know it, like pretty great opportunities for these young guys. Plus, by the way, like the, I always take care of my people, so I'll end up giving them like, you know, points or equity probably, and, and some of the stuff we're building and maybe this tool, uh, and hopefully make them multimillionaires. Okay. So this comes to our world of two realities. Silicon Valley, the advantage was technical complexity, build what's hard to build, pay expensive engineers, charge for access, and AI is compressing that. But for us, the everyday entrepreneurs, including you freelancers out there, the advantage is like understanding markets, understanding people, matching problems to solutions. You don't need VCs, you don't need a board, and AI makes us even stronger. And you can implement fast, you can test faster, you can get data faster, it's less expensive. And again, as a freelancer, you can go help people with those, you know, uh, to businesses to do this and profit handsomely as a result., okay? Just as a quick example, kind of case studies, I've got a few CA Pro members, right? I mean, well, I have a ton, but one CA Pro member was doing $2.5 million a month maybe a year ago. They're doing over $15 million a month now. That's not purely AI, but it's a big part of it, right? They've incorporated AI into all of their workflows, the video creatives they put out, media buying, smart A/B testing. And you might think that's a big one, but there's tons of people in Pro who maybe went from $500,000 a month to, you know, $1 million or $2 million a month, went from $1 million to $2 million, $2 million to $5 million, all of that. And a big part of the reason why is because they're working more efficiently and more effectively, and they're testing like hundreds of meta ads. Like one guy tested 1,000 meta ads over a weekend, very efficiently, by the way, and without spending a fortune. They're throwing up advertorials and landing pages. They'll test like, you know, 8 or 10 different sort of dropshipping offers or brands like over a week, see which ones work, scale those. And they're vibe coding backends and membership portals and things that even if they sell a physical product, they have these sort of high margin backends that make their LTV better and their whole kind of offer funnel brand stickier, right? And so I've seen this play out like with all my CA Pro members as we speak, okay? And so at the end of the day, the bottom line here is stop listening to people playing a different game. People saying it's over are describing their world, not yours. Opportunity is shifting away from pure technical execution and towards people who solve real problems. And, you know, if you've got a good knowledge of AI plus marketing and, and how to sell and how to reach consumers, it's an incredibly powerful combination. So again, for you, the window is wide open, uh, maybe wider than it's ever been. So go build something because it is indeed Not even close to over for you. You are not cooked. Life is good and exciting. And I wanted to share this because there's lots of doom, and I wanted to give you a little dose of optimism. Thank you.