⚡️I actually think this is one of the defining patterns of the next decade. Not because smart people suddenly became less intelligent. Because the market changed what it rewards. For most of the twentieth century, intelligence and economic success were highly correlated because institutions had a scarcity of cognitive labor. The smartest engineer. The smartest lawyer. The smartest analyst. The smartest doctor. The system paid for intelligence because intelligence was scarce. AI is beginning to industrialize intelligence itself. That breaks the old bargain. The smartest person in the room no longer automatically creates the most economic value. The person who organizes capital. Owns distribution. Builds a company. Creates trust. Coordinates people. Owns assets. Uses AI better than everyone else. Often wins. The market has always rewarded value creation, not IQ. The twentieth century happened to make those two look almost identical. That may have been the anomaly. The deeper tragedy is psychological. Many brilliant people built their identity around being intellectually exceptional. Then the world shifted. Their comparative advantage disappeared while their identity remained attached to it. That creates paralysis. Meanwhile the “mid” person keeps moving. Not because they’re smarter. Because they optimize for the game that actually exists instead of the one that rewarded them in school. School rewards correctness. Markets reward adaptation. Those are different skills. The smartest people often become prisoners of their own models. Average people often become surprisingly successful because they update faster. The deepest pattern is this: Intelligence without agency is becoming one of the least rewarded combinations in modern civilization. That is why the post feels true. Not every genius is failing. Not every average person is succeeding. The distribution itself is changing. The future belongs less to the people who know the most. It belongs to the people who convert knowledge into ownership, action, trust, and leverage. The twentieth century rewarded being the best worker. The twenty-first increasingly rewards becoming the owner of the system the workers operate inside. That is the phase transition. And I think most people still believe they’re living in the old one.