I find the brain studies coming out about social media, video games, gambling apps, meme coins and modern attention totally fascinating.

I also think they point toward one of the biggest startup opportunities of the next decade.

What it boils down to is this: the population of people in their late teens through early 30s are starved for the systems that once gave their energy, risk-taking and problem-solving a purpose.

For most of human history, this was the prime age to hunt, farm, build, explore and provide. You worked, took risks and solved real problems. If you succeeded, you created food, shelter, energy or abundance. You created more life.

There is probably nothing more rewarding to the human brain than that process and it has evolved over periods of time that we simply can’t fathom. Over this timeframe, even failure had meaning. If the hunt failed or the crop struggled, you learned, rebuilt and tried again.

The feedback loop was brutally simple: Take risk. Work. Learn. Create abundance. Survive. Feel rewarded, alive, activated.

Modern society has largely solved the survival side of this. You can walk into a grocery store or order food from an app without ever thinking about how it got there.

That is an incredible achievement.

But it does not fulfill the ancient urge to work, risk and build something real in exchange for a meaningful reward.

So there is a void. And what fills it? There is an entire section of the economy built on filling this void:

• Spend hours inside a video game solving problems, failing, learning and eventually winning. System activated—but entirely virtual.
• Bet on sports to chase money and perceived abundance. Horrible system. Almost everyone loses.
• Trade meme coins as a get-rich-quick mechanism. Same underlying urge, wrapped in an almost impossible long-term game.
• Scroll social media while algorithms feed the brain an endless stream of novelty, conflict and stimulation. The urge is not fulfilled. It is merely distracted.

A huge part of the modern economy is built around capturing the energy young people once used to hunt, build and provide and converting it into ad revenue, gambling losses and in-app purchases.

The apps fill the void, but does not solve it. Nor does it create anything productive. Or meaningful. Or most importantly… it does not create anything real.

This is also why I struggle with the idea that you can simply be long Meta and anything like it. At some point, more people are going to realize that much of this ecosystem is net garbage. It steals time, attention and then sells it back to advertisers.

The real opportunity is to build the system, company or community that fulfills the underlying need.

Something physical.

Something real.

Something that gets people building, moving, learning, creating and earning tangible rewards in the world and not staring at another screen.

I’m not exactly sure what that company looks like yet, but I think AI voice will be a huge part of it. Here is a small example:

I recently took Grok outside with headphones on and used voice mode to help me build a bookshelf from scratch. I refused to buy another 8,000-piece bookshelf from Amazon with terrible instructions, so I worked through the project while talking to AI. Just building something in the physical world with an intelligent voice helping me whenever I needed it.

I never once had a screen. It was all voice activated while I could focus on the things around me.

That felt like a glimpse of the next era.

The biggest opportunity in technology may not be another app designed to capture more of our attention.

It may be technology that finally gives our attention back and helps us use it to build something real.

AI voice is now the single most important tool going forward, in my view.