if you're in your 20s, listen to this

Good afternoon. There's ACL the Austin festival going on right outside my window. It's kind of very distracting in the background here. Anyway this channel nowadays is nearly all about AI. We cover a lot of AI tools and platforms and ways that you can become more productive, make more money, be more creative, be a happier, more sound individual with AI. But this channel started out as a finance channel. Like three years ago when I, after I stopped making videos in the fitness niche and then got back on as more of a, you know, finance business creator. And that goes very deep for me, right? I have two degrees in economics. I was writing books about the stock market and investing when I was like 12, 13 years old. And so I want to take a moment in this video today to do something we don't do a lot of anymore, which is talk about, I think a very. Topical matter on the subject of finance for young people. So if you're in your 20s, I'm 21. And what that is, is this root idea, this, I think, cancer that is kind of spreading throughout our generation. And I'm starting to see a lot of it extends from like the millennials down to Gen Z, down to... What is it, Gen Alpha, Gen A, I don't know. But it's a very scary idea, and it's one that I think if you adhere to in how you act in your career, Your financial decision-making and your life as a whole will just produce worse outcomes. It is probabilistically going to screw you over. Maybe occasionally it'll benefit someone, but out of a hundred of you watching this or every hundred of you watching this, if you all believe that and act upon that belief, 98 of you will be much worse off. And what catalyzed me making this video was this very material example of kind of the heights to which that idea has grown. which was the New York mayor on Instagram. He was making some comments. We'll find the clip. So let's play that. Let's play a few seconds of that now. It feels like you have to luck out in some big way. Yeah. I feel like it's why a lot of people play the lottery. That's for many. It feels like their only chance. People. Think that they have better odds playing the lottery than making it in their own life. What does that say about the country that we live in? He just said it very bluntly, which is it feels like you have to get lucky to succeed or to get ahead. And I don't need to tell this to you. You know exactly how common that is. The feeling of the old system isn't going to work for me. And I'm never going to see the light of day financially in my career. Unless I get really lucky, unless I'm gambling on prediction markets and I make a bunch of money or my options trading blows up or my meme coins, right, whatever it is. Now, a quick thing here, if you are building apps with AI, there's one part that most of the tutorials out there miss, and that is email. That's things like sign-up confirmations, password resets, receipts, notifications. Your app can look done, but if it can't actually talk to your users and give them communications that they need, then it's not actually done or ready for deployment. So I want to show you how to fix that in about a minute with the sponsor of today's video, Brevo. Here I've got a simple app built in Lovable and I want it to send, let's say, a welcome email when someone signs up. So Lovable has a native Brevo connector, so I just ask for it in plain English, then I connect my Brevo account and it wires everything up and we're done, so let's test it. I sign up with my own email and then I get the email, there it is, that is a real welcome email with my name in it sent. through Brevo, and it's that easy to connect to where you build your AI app. And I really mean that easy. You're not locked into Lovable, whether you use Cursor or Claude Code or any other stack, it's a standard REST or SMTP call. They have SDKs in seven languages, a sandbox for testing, webhooks. Basically, if you use any AI builder, you're going to be able to use Brevo to send emails for your apps. And it gets better. You can start completely for free with 300 emails per day, Forever with no credit card added to your account. There's also SMS and automations on the platform. And overall, this is one of the best transactional email APIs for developers and vibe coders. And so when you're ready to scale and you need to send even more emails, you can use my code in the description or comment Brevo, B-R-E-V-O under this video. To get 50% off your first three months on the starter and standard plans. So great platform that is again 50% off and code in the description or comment Brevo under this video and let's get back to it. And it makes complete sense that everyone feels that way because there's a lot of very structural things that have gone south financially for this generation. Principally AI has kind of thrown a whole just wrench in the system of everything. Number two, college is vastly more expensive. The ROI on it is just that much lower than it's ever been. Housing, on average, is much more expensive. Relationship dynamics are kind of screwed up, which changes the whole financial equation as well. And so what it can feel like, I think, is, OK, I played the game in the way I was told I was supposed to. And that's not working for me. And if I look at the next 20, 30, 40, 50 years on my current trajectory, it's never going to work for me. And so, yeah, if you take that as given and you assume that you can do nothing to change that, then yes, you would have to get lucky to get ahead. But that is why that idea is so cancerous to me. Because it assumes that you have no power to change you. To change the you in that situation. And I think if you lose that, then you lose your own volition. You lose your... agency and your power as an individual to change your life and your trajectory. I know you're probably like, what is going on? Because we just make a hundred videos again about AI consumer platforms. And now I'm here speaking to you about the purpose of your career and agency. But I think this matters really, which is why I'm making this video. If you act as if If your career and your life trajectory is a lottery, then you lose your agency and volition as an individual. I'll say that again. So I want this to just be a PSA of like, no, take some agency, take some responsibility, and assume that if you work really, really, really hard to change your situation, maybe not in the way you were told you had to work hard, but in the path that you can and will find, then that is how you get ahead. The more that you put into it, The more that you get out of it, and if you want exceptional results, and yeah, maybe today exceptional means being able to buy a home before you're 30. If you want those results and you need exceptional inputs, you need to outwork, to outthink, to outstrategize, to out whatever the majority of people who you are in this game with. That doesn't mean it's zero sum. Some, it is vastly positive some, but you have to assume, and I believe. It is true, and you can see this anywhere and everywhere in the United States, that if you take that kind of agency and responsibility and you work at it, at that, for a very long period of time, I said before, with that first frame out of 100 of you watching this, 98, 99 will be vastly worse off if you believe that first frame. For this frame, 98, 99% of you will be better off. will be vastly better off if you adhere to that notion, and that is the core of how you approach your career and your financial life. And yes, that's not 100. 100 of you could go and work incredibly hard for your whole lives, and one of you will still get crushed, annihilated. Things will go very south, and that's life. But for 98 or 99 others of you, you will have a much better life ultimately in a lot of of ways, not just financially, versus... Believing that it's a lottery and it's a gamble and it's just whoever kind of gets lucky or stumbles across something that works. And you can debate all you want whether it's actually true, whether these days you have to get ahead with a lottery or by gambling. Well, you cannot debate. What you absolutely cannot debate is whether that frame is useful to you or not useful to you, regardless of whether it is true. And I do think it's true. And again, you can debate that, right? That's like, that is something we can talk through. But it doesn't serve you as a belief to think that if that is the case, that will just make your situation even worse. So don't do something which is worse for you. Or if you do, you're just accepting that you're gonna roll over and then that's it. That's game over. I don't think that's a good frame or way in which you wanna live your life. And I think also our generation thinking like that Screws over a lot of things that makes a lot of other things worse for a lot of other people, because if you assume that that's the case, you're going to be less invested in your career. You're going to be less invested in your family. You're going to vote in certain ways that accrue resources to you instead of what's better for the whole. Basically, a lot of other things get screwed up if you believe the system is broken. And so whether it is or isn't, and I can tell I'm going to tell you from my perspective, it's not. You can see examples of that everywhere. But whether it is or isn't, let's put aside whether it is or isn't for a second. You will not be better off if you believe it is. And the system is not the way you were told to go about things. The system is you taking agency and working really hard for a long period of time to change or improve your situation. Okay, the spiel is nearly over. I'll say it again and I'll just wrap up with that idea of, I think that notion of Do you have the volition to change the situation? That is something very, very special and important. And if you lose that core, you start to just kind of float about and do a bunch of things which are not good for you and not good. So you have to stay stuck to that core. Or if you move away from it, you have to do so very, very carefully and you have to acknowledge what you're doing there. And I worry a lot when I see things like the mayor and also just people. People my age, right? Where there's that kind of sentiment and feeling out there. And that's not everyone. That's definitely not everyone. But there is a sizable segment of people who feel that way. And so once again, stay the course. Stay stuck on that idea because that idea will serve you. And that idea is true. Okay, so we're going to get back to regular programming tomorrow. We'll see you tomorrow, but. I hope this was some food for thought. I appreciate you being here and spending your time watching this. I wish you well out there wherever you are, and I'll see you in the next one.