Hey, everybody. So here are my thoughts on this whole Silicon Valley decoupling thing.

I was going to just do this as a little rant at the end of an episode this week, but it kept

growing and growing as I was writing it. So I figured why not just do the whole thing? Here you go.

I think there's a fundamental structural advantage that Silicon Valley and the U.S. tech industry

has enjoyed for 30 years that might be on the verge of breaking down, and I don't think

enough people are thinking about this. Tech has become monolithic, right? It's eaten the world.

Tech is now 40% of the S&P 500.

The magnificent seven companies alone, alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft,

Nvidia, and Tesla by themselves.

Account for 35% of the U.S. stock market.

Individual tech companies have market caps bigger than the GDP of entire countries. By some estimates, the gap in

GDP growth between Europe and the U.S. is entirely due to tech. We know this. The entire world

uses Silicon Valley's products and services. The modern world literally runs on the innovation

Silicon Valley has produced. Why has this happened? Well, one reason that is so obvious

people don't think about it much is that in a way, for 30 years, Silicon Valley has had a monopoly

on the tech stack and the innovation stack that covered the whole world. The world uses our phones,

our operating systems, our computers, our social networks, our servers, our cloud, our streaming

video and music services. Modern Silicon Valley exploded in the 1990s right after the Cold War ended,

and Silicon Valley piggybacked on the fact that the whole world was open to trade, and America was

the sole superpower, and there wasn't really any other competition for our tech products beyond

maybe Japan and South Korea. And besides exceptions like

China, literally the whole world was open to our products. Sure, our stuff was manufactured

...