Trump Proves Attention Beats Competence | Crypto, FIFA & the New Power Game

Ultimise. Trump has now done something I didn't think was possible. He made me consider rooting against America in World Cup soccer. That's like making me nostalgic for Spirit Airlines. First, nearly a million people lost $3.8 billion buying Trump crypto coins. And I'm sorry, but if you see Trump and crypto together and think, finally, a safe place for my retirement money, you don't need the SEC. You need adult supervision. Then Trump leans on FIFA and suddenly a US red card suspension gets magically deferred. Great. We finally get Americans to care about soccer and Trump turned it into a Mar-a-Lago with shin guards. And now PhD admissions are dropping, which is perfect because apparently America's new innovation strategy is fewer scientists, more meme coins. Let's talk about the bigger issue underneath all of this because Trump is not the only person who's figured out that attention is now power. He's just the most orange, obvious, and legally footnoted example. Scott Galloway's ProfG Media has a smart and disturbing piece out arguing that the new superstar founder is not just a founder. The new founder is an influencer. Credit where credit's due, Isabella Kienzel writing for ProfG Media lays out the case clearly. Founders with large audiences can raise money more easily. Spend less on consumer acquisition, and build companies around communities before they even have real products. That's the observation, and it's true. It's also a little terrifying because the old theory of capitalism was that somebody built a better mousetrap. The new theory is that somebody posts 6 times a day about how emotionally difficult it is to disrupt mice, and investors say, my God, he understands Gen Z rodent pain points, give him $40 million. The article gives real examples. Roy Li builds Clue.ly, a tool associated with cheating on coding interviews, gets expelled from Columbia, turns "cheat on everything" into a viral slogan and raises serious money. Tyler Denk at Beehive turns transparency into a growth strategy, posting milestones and board-style updates in public. Meadow Lane turns construction delays and grocery store chaos into a serialized TikTok show. Good Girl Snacks sees that pickle content is exploding and builds a pickle brand around daily posting before the product is even fully there. Now, these are not dumb examples. Some of them are impressive. There is real business insight here. Distribution matters. Storytelling matters. Community matters. I spent decades telling executives and entrepreneurs that if you can't explain what you do in a compelling way, you're at a massive disadvantage. That part, not new. What is new is the scale. What is new is that attention itself may now be more valuable than competence. And that's where this goes from interesting business trend to civilization may need a designated driver because communication has always mattered for founders. Steve Jobs was not just a product person. He was a master storyteller. Elon Musk, before he became the world's richest reply guy, understood drama, spectacle, and narrative. Oprah built an empire on trust. Martha Stewart built one on taste. Richard Branson built one on personality. So no, it's not some horrifying new sin that founders need to communicate. Founders should communicate. Leaders should communicate. CEOs should explain themselves like human beings instead of sending out press releases that sound like they were written by a hostage with an MBA. But the question is, communicate what? A real vision, a real product, a real solution, or just the world's longest audition tape for being worshipped by strangers? That's the problem, because if distribution is the new moat, then the people who already command attention have an enormous structural advantage. Joe Rogan may have a good podcast, I'm not saying he's about to start the next JP Morgan. What if he wanted to? In the real world, a Joe Rogan figure is better positioned to start a giant company than some quiet genius who has spent 20 years actually understanding supply chains, medicine, energy, agriculture, or finance. That should worry us. Would you like to be the sort of successful person who is dominating news, at least in your industry? Well, if so, it's time to up your skills. At ultimize.com, I've created online courses to help you do that. Now, here's the thing, no obligation. You can get a free course on communication skills, a free course on how to build better habits. All you have to do is go to ultimize.com. That's ultimize.com. No obligation. Go there now. MrBeast seems like a good guy. He is talented. He understands online audiences better than almost anyone alive. But do we really want a future where the person most qualified to build the next airline, hospital chain, university, grocery network, or financial institution is the person who can get the most people to click on I buried myself alive for 7 days? Again, I'm not attacking MrBeast. I'm attacking the incentive structure. There is a difference. Because if the market says the best founder is the person with the biggest audience, then eventually the founder with the biggest audience gets to shape the future of work, food, transportation, banking, education, and healthcare. And that means the next Walmart competitor may not have been started by someone who understands retail. It may be started by the 12-year-old kid who became famous unwrapping toys. And congratulations to him. I hope he enjoys middle school and antitrust law. But at some point, we have to ask, Do we want 1 million workers' lives controlled by the person who mastered the thumbnail face? Do we want entire industries built around who can hold attention rather than who can solve problems? Do we want venture capital to become a talent agency with spreadsheets? Because that is what this starts to look like. And the Trump crypto story is the ugliest version of the same disease. Trump did not need to build anything useful. He didn't need to create value. He didn't need to invent a product, improve a service, or make one human life better. He had attention. He had loyalty. He had a parasocial relationship with millions of people who believe he's rich, brilliant, persecuted, and somehow always the victim, even when he is the casino. So he slaps his name on a meme coin. Nearly a million buyers lose money. He profits and everyone else acts shocked. Why? This is not a scandal that came out of nowhere. This is the entire Trump brand compressed into a digital slot machine. The customer puts in money, Trump pulls the lever, Trump wins. The customer says, well, at least he owned the libs. And I know that sounds harsh, but at some point, if you're still investing money in something because Trump put his name on it. You're not an innocent lamb wandering into Wall Street. You're aiding and abetting your own financial mugging. You're handing your wallet to a man in a gold-plated alley and saying, please teach me about blockchain, sir. Now, the founder-influencer world is not all Trump. That would be unfair. A lot of these founders are creative, hardworking, transparent, and genuinely interesting. Some are building real companies. Some are creating real value. Some are using attention to lower the cost of customer acquisition, which is perfectly legitimate. If you can build a real audience because people trust you and then you sell them something useful, it's fantastic. That is capitalism at its best. But the darker side is that attention does not distinguish between trust and manipulation. Attention doesn't know the difference between authenticity and performance. Attention doesn't care whether the founder is a visionary or a demagogue. It just counts the clicks. And unfortunately, what some people call interesting, other people call racist, fraudulent, reckless, cruel, or just good old-fashioned lying. Rage bait works. Conspiracy works. Victimhood works. Outrage— oh boy, does that work. If the market rewards attention above all else, then the market will produce people who are very, very good at getting attention. Not truth, not quality, not responsibility— attention. That's how you get a world where the loudest person in the room becomes the most investible person in the room. And every quiet expert becomes the guy in the back saying, actually, there are serious regulatory concerns, while the influencer founder is already on CNBC announcing a $9 billion valuation for Uber for squirrels. This is why the PhD story matters too, because at the same time we're elevating the influencers into founder gods, our research universities are admitting fewer doctoral students. That means fewer scientists, fewer researchers, fewer people trained to spend years trying to solve hard problems that don't immediately go viral. You know what never trends? Incremental Advance in Material Science After 11 Years of Controlled Laboratory Work. Terrible thumbnail, but that is how civilization advances. Not everything important looks good on TikTok. Cancer research does not always have a personal brand. Quantum computing does not need a ring light. Climate change does not become more true because the scientist has better merch. And yet we are building an economy that increasingly says visibility equals credibility. That's dangerous because the people who are best at being seen are not always the people who are best at seeing. There is a difference. A real founder should be able to communicate. Absolutely. A real leader should be able to tell a story. Absolutely. But storytelling should illuminate substance. It shouldn't replace substance. The story should be the window, it should not be the whole house. And right now, too much of American life is becoming one giant pitch deck with no product underneath. Politics is branding, crypto is branding, universities are begging for stable funding while influencers are raising millions for pickle snacks and cheating apps. Soccer becomes geopolitics with cleats. And Trump floats through all of it like a man who sees every institution not as something to respect, but as something to monetize, corrupt, or turn into a loyalty test. He touches crypto and his followers lose billions. He touches science policy and universities pull back. He touches the World Cup and suddenly even rooting for Team USA feels like signing an affidavit in support of corruption. That is his gift. He doesn't merely cheat at the game, he makes you feel stupid for still believing games should have rules. And that's the real issue with the founder-influencer economy too. Rules are boring. Expertise is slow. Truth is complicated. Institutions are annoying. But attention— attention's fast. Attention's liquid. Attention can be converted into money. Votes, companies, pardons, coins, and power. So here's the new rule. If distribution is the new moat, then character has to become the new due diligence. Not follower count, not charisma, not founder energy, not whether the guy can make a podcast host laugh for 3 hours while drinking bone broth, but character. Does this person tell the truth? When lying would be more profitable? Does this person build something useful when grifting would be easier? Does this person want customers or disciples? Does this person want investors or believers? Does this person want employees or a fan club with health insurance? Because the future should not belong automatically to whoever has the biggest audience. It should belong to people who can combine attention with competence, communication with character, storytelling with substance. Yeah, founders need to tell better stories, but the rest of us need to become better listeners. We need to ask, what is behind the story? What is the product? Who benefits? Who gets hurt? Who's cashing out? Who's left holding the Trump coin when the music stops? Because if we don't ask those questions, then the future will be run by whoever can get the most clicks. And that may be entertaining, but so is a dog riding a skateboard. I don't want him running the Federal Reserve either. I'm TJ Walker. This is Filtered.