The AI ecosystem and the finance ecosystem are the same thing. They are both anxiety factories designed to sell you a cure for a disease they invented.
I was reading a post by the writer Machina (@EXM7777) about why everyone feels like a loser in the AI race. He points out that even Andrej Karpathy – the guy who helped found OpenAI and built Tesla’s Autopilot – recently admitted he feels “behind” as a programmer.
Think about that. If the Michael Jordan of AI feels like he’s drowning, you and I are already dead in the water.
Machina argues this happens for three reasons:
- The content machine runs on urgency.
- Every tool you don’t use feels like a loss.
- Infinite options kill your ability to choose.
As I read that, it clicked. That isn’t just code. That is the exact business model of Wall Street.
1. The Urgency Trap CNBC will never open the hour with “Markets functioned normally today, go about your business.”
Dan Ives doesn’t get booked on TV to say “Apple is probably fairly valued right now.”
Boring doesn’t sell ads. “CRASH IMMINENT” sells ads. “The Next Nvidia” sells ads. The financial media is a carnival barker screaming that the tent is on fire, just to sell you a bucket of water. They aren’t selling advice. They are selling adrenaline.
2. The Phantom Loss Missing out hurts twice as much as losing money. That is a glitch in your biological software, and Wall Street hacks it every day.
You see a hedge fund up 34% and your brain whispers, I could have had that. You see Gold triple and think, I knew it.
Your brain rewrites history to turn a trade you never considered into a personal failure. You didn’t lose money. You just failed to win the lottery. But the anxiety feels the same.
3. The Cereal Aisle Problem There are thousands of public companies. Crypto. Private Equity. Structured notes. The menu gets longer every quarter.
When you stand in the cereal aisle and see 400 options, you don’t feel freedom. You feel paralysis. You freeze.
The Expensive Cure So what do you do when you are frozen, anxious, and full of regret?
You hire a guide.
You walk into a nice office with mahogany desks and hire a financial advisor. You agree to pay a 1% annual fee – plus the hidden fees inside the products they sell you.
You aren’t paying for performance. You are paying for anesthesia.
You are paying them to make the anxiety stop. The sheer volume of noise makes you feel like you must have a professional. Once you hire one, the relief washes over you. Problem solved.
The “Dating” Illusion But how did you pick this savior?
Likely, you picked the one with the best story. The Goldman advisor tells a compelling narrative about “structured notes” (conveniently skipping the years they imploded).
It’s like dating. The people best at getting a date are rarely the best at being a partner. The skill set required to seduce you – charm, flash, bold promises – is the exact opposite of the skill set required to build wealth – patience, discipline, boredom.
You fell for the pickup artist.
The Reality Check Here is the cold math. The Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan has armies of PhDs. They have supercomputers. They have billions in leverage. They are the market.
And they barely beat the index after fees.
If the most sophisticated financial predators on earth can’t reliably beat the market, do you really think Dave from the strip mall office can?
The Solution Ask yourself which is more likely: a) that you and your advisor can combine to beat the market with your portfolio (and by beat I mean reliably achieve more return for your chosen level of risk than is offered by a simple mix of stocks and bonds) or b) that your advisor has his position by dint of his ability to sell his skills, but doesn’t have the skills himself. Since we know that market-beating performance is quite rare (and results in things like hedge funds closed to new money) Occam’s Razor suggests you have selected an advisor based on sales and marketing, not on investment ability.
You are losing this game because the game is rigged to extract fees, not generate wealth. The marketing, the FOMO, the “I could have bought Bitcoin” regret – it’s all noise designed to separate you from your 1%.
Step out of the factory. The solution is boring, and it fits on a post-it note:
- Buy the entire market (cheaply).
- Do nothing.
You don’t need a stock picker. You need a behavior coach to slap your hand when you try to sell during a panic. That’s it.
Everything else is just sales.
