Lazy Money Issue 27

Happy Sunday!

Today: If it takes 61 seconds, it’s dead.

The Story

Nobody finishes anything anymore - books, movies, articles, relationships - we bail after 30 seconds. We're all walking around with dopamine-fried neurons, and the attention span of a coked-up squirrel.

People are freaking out about it. "Phone bad!" "TikTok is digital heroin!" "We're raising zombies!" Parents dragging their kids to screen-addiction therapy while checking Instagram in the waiting room.

But there’s a different side to this story…

The most "brain-rotted" generation is also the richest generation under 25 in history. Kids who can't read books are making $50K a month on YouTube. Dropouts who can't sit through lectures are building million-dollar businesses on Instagram.

Maybe we didn't break…maybe we evolved…

Designed by thousands of years of evolution to be this way. Hypervigilant. Constantly scanning. Always ready to pivot.

For 200 years we tried to fight this. We drugged kids who couldn't focus and shamed adults who got distracted.

And yet…

Everything that’s profitable is now 30 seconds or less. TikTok. Reels. Shorts.

The entire economy reorganized around our actual attention spans instead of our aspirational ones. You should do the same…

How To Profit

• Pocket Therapist 🧠💊

You pay $200, cry for an hour, feel better for 20 minutes, then go right back to your toxic patterns. Therapy kinda sounds like a scam?

Build a mental health app that arrives like BeReal notifications. Random times each day, you get a 30-second prompt. Record how you're feeling, what you're thinking, where your anxiety is.

The app builds a pattern map of your mental state, serves you relevant 30-second coping techniques exactly when your patterns suggest you need them. It's therapy broken into bite-sized, actionable moments instead of weekly hour-long sessions you forget immediately. 

• SwipeReads 📖📱

War and Peace is 1,400 pages. Nobody's reading that. But they'll scroll TikTok for 3 hours straight.

Build an app that chops every book into 60-second hits. Turn them into swipeable chunks like Instagram stories. Not summaries - the actual book, but redesigned for dopamine hits. Each swipe gives readers a perfectly crafted micro-chapter that ends on a cliffhanger.

The app tracks reading speed, serves the next chunk at the perfect moment, adds ambient music that matches the mood.

Build this and become the TikTok of literature - $9.99/month for unlimited book-scrolling, authors paid by engagement time just like Spotify pays musicians.

• Smart Parent App 📚👨‍👩‍👧‍👦

Your kid comes home talking about photosynthesis and you're nodding along like you know what that means. You don't. You're 38 and still don't know the difference between mitosis and meiosis.

Build an app that sends parents 1 minute summaries of what their kids learned that day in school. Not the whole textbook - just enough so you don't look stupid at dinner. "Today Sarah learned fractions. Here's the distilled version." Now you can actually help with homework instead of saying "ask your mother" every time they need help.

Schools will pay for this. Parents are desperate for it. Transparency, bonding, engagement - tick tick tick. Potential to tap into a huge market if executed correctly.

The Ace Toolkit

Ace always said, "Attention is the new oil. Drill where everyone's already looking."

OpusClip - Feed it one long video, it spits out 10 viral shorts. AI finds the hooks, adds captions, picks the moments people won't scroll past.

The TikTok Creative Center - Free tool that shows you exactly what's going viral right now, which hooks are working, which sounds are exploding. It's basically insider trading for attention.

Until next time,

Alex

Founder //LZY MNY CLB