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Jonah
So I saw a shocking, shocking chart. More and more households are paying for AI. Okay, so I'm sure a lot of people are on the free tier, but the share of US households with paid AI subscriptions is 2.2%.
Avi
What's up, Jonah? Welcome to the greatest game on the planet. Trading, investing, making money. Welcome to Thousand X. I'm trying something new. I'm trying to channel my inner Alex Jones. That wasn't. That wasn't perfect, but I'll get there.
Jonah
I'm in. I'm in an echoey room here, so maybe I should try to channel somebody. We could go, oh, let's get ready to rumble. Wow.
Avi
Holy. We gotta clip that.
Jonah
Yeah.
Avi
And just use that as the start of every podcast. Jesus Christ. There's actually a drill going on upstairs, which I guess is now the life of a content creator. You gotta contend with, you know, ambient noise and all that kind of stuff. It's the beauty of living in. In the West Village in New York. It's always some nonsense going on, but
Jonah
Jonah, neighborhood, I loved. I loved the West Village. I lived on Bleecker and Charles. I had the. Basically the entire second story of a townhouse on that. On that corner.
Avi
Oh, you lived in a townhouse. That's nice because you were rich or something.
Jonah
No, it was actually pretty crappy. It was owned. This is an investment lesson. It was owned by this landlord, guy named Archie Tarpinian. He was like 90 years old and had no email address. I had to deal with him over the phone. He didn't have a management company. I'm like, I learned that he owns basically, like, two entire blocks of the West Village. I'm like, how did you do this? I asked him one day, and he was like, you know, super thick bridge and tunnel accent that I don't want to imitate on this. On this podcast. But basically, his answer, no, you should.
Avi
You should imitate it. As long as it's not, like an ethnic accent. I actually think you don't get canceled.
Jonah
I. You know, I actually. I can't. I was pretending that I didn't want to, but I can't. That's one.
Avi
Give it a shot. Come on. The people want to hear.
Jonah
He was basically like, jonah, Jonah. I was a janitor. I was a janitor. I earned. I forget what he said. It was like, I earned 15 cents an hour, and I just saved my money and I bought, like, three blocks of Bleecker street when it was, you know, a rough area. Rough area and aria. And I was thinking to myself, like, Three blocks of Bleecker Street. Like, what year is this? I forget what he said. It was basically like 1930s or some great depression. Basically, like, what now costs $20 million back then costs like five grand. And he did it with leverage. And, you know, I look back on previous generations, I'm sure previous generations will look back on those of us who didn't buy Bitcoin and be like, dad, why didn't you do it? It was so obvious, you know, much like I look at my parents, I'm like, are you serious? You could have bought all this crazy choice San Francisco. My parents looked at a place on Lombard street in San Francisco, the squiggly street where a house goes for like, like the entry level home there Is cost like 30 million. They wanted to buy one for like 200 grand, and they're like, nah, let's live in Berkeley instead and get a $200,000 house in Berkeley instead of Lombard Street.
Avi
You know, not everybody has foresight, Jonah. Not everybody can see the future like you, you know, so I, I, I definitely can't. I mean, I can't, Like, I have no freaking clue. You know, if you ask me, like, where, like, what is the next upand cominging place to buy property or where should you, your kids don't have to work and can just live off their generational trust fund, the answer is I don't know. But you know what I do know? If you own stocks and if you own Bitcoin, and if you invest your money properly and if you max out your 401k, if you are a newly graduated doctor, put all your excess savings into your 401k. If you're a newly minted analyst, put all your savings into, like, literally just save as much money as you can possibly save for the first, first few years of your life. And that will set you up to be so much happier down the line. And I know this is called the Thousand X podcast, and people are like, well, like, we want a Thousand X. We want to find a meme coin. We want to buy that weird black Bull coin. And you know where we want to buy cash, Cat. And we want to make as much money as we humanly can in a short period of time. And I'm here to say, listen, buddy, you need to say, like, the first five years of your life, if you can save that money and just like, plow it in, I guarantee you you're not missing out on that much. Like, it actually becomes so much better once where you're like 20. Like, if you're a man. Specifically if you're, if you have like a little bit of money at 24, like, it literally doesn't matter. But if you have a lot of money at 29 to 35, you're great, you're in a great spot, you're having the best time of your life. You're going to have way more fun than having a little bit of money at 24. My personal opinion.
Jonah
So, so you're saying people should just save it in cash or should they
Avi
just do something, everything just straight into the markets and then maybe listen to this podcast because every now and then you're going to find some interesting trades to take. And that's what I would be doing is basically spending as little as possible for the first five years of your post college grad life, because it doesn't really matter. Like, like I guarantee, like when I look, when I look back at the money that I spent from the ages of 22 to 27, kind of like it, it actually just kind of didn't matter. Like I didn't really get much out of it, to be honest.
Jonah
Also, you were, I don't know if that, that's appropriate. I mean, like, you're probably right. I'm thinking about something weird happened when you turned 26 or 27. And that thing was called Covid or maybe that was when you were 25.
Avi
I was, I was 25 when covet happened. I was a young buck, which is crazy. Can you, can you believe that? Covid was six years ago at this point, Jonah. Six years ago.
Jonah
It's wild. I can't believe it. I mean, basically where I'm at with this is before COVID like prices had some sort of meaning to me. They were sensible. Now when I buy stuff, I, you know, I can't even leave my house without spending $100. Prices that would have been like a once in a decade purchase are now just like kind of normalized. A business class, flight costs and what, you know, basically what would have bought you like a luxury car 10 years ago. I don't understand what's going on with money. I think it's that something to do with Joe Biden and the other leaders of the COVID era just printing like $30 trillion.
Avi
Here's the thing, Jonah, it's not just Joe Biden, it's everybody. Everybody's a populist now. Everybody's just saying that we're going to print money. And the beauty of what's happening right now is actually that it's kind of going to be okay. And the reason that I say it's kind of going to be okay is because we got ridiculously lucky. Jonah. So historically, what ends up happening in a capitalist system is that people get over their skis, they get over levered chasing bubbles, chasing technology. When you look at the dot com bubble, you look at the railroad bubble, look at literally every bubble that's ever happened. We allocated capital far faster than productivity could keep up. And so you get, you got these massive boom bust cycles. Now. What happened with COVID was very interesting, right? You get a ton of money that's printed pushed into the system, inflation goes through the roof, and suddenly you're sitting there and you're thinking to yourself, wow, we're in a really bad spot. We not only have a ton of debt, inflation is coming in. Maybe there's something good here that maybe we'll be able to inflate away the debt. But the politicians kind of don't want to stop spending. They all want to keep spending. So how are we going to get out of this and where are we going to put our money? So people, I think, shoved into equities in many ways to escape the woes of inflation and tried to pull forward a lot of the productivity, which is kind of, again, what you saw during the COVID bubble. You see meta go through the roof, you see Amazon go through the roof, you see all these stocks go through the roof, right? But then what ends up happening is ChatGPT comes out and AI suddenly becomes the most transformative technology since the Internet. And not only that, it's actually leading to productivity gains and it's actually potentially a deflationary technology. So kind of. Right, exactly. At the time that we needed this to happen, it happened right at the time that inflation was coming back. Right at the time when we were in potentially an equities mega bubble. We actually generated this incredible technology and it's kind of bailing us out right now. And I think this is what the bears are not really understanding is that the adoption and pace of AI is much faster actually than the Internet. There was a, there was a hardware problem with the Internet bubble. You needed a computer and Internet hooked up to every household in America in order for your average person to take advantage of it. There's no hardware road, there's no roadblock here. It's the roadblock is compute, which we're building a ton of. And the way that people get access to AI is very simple. You download it onto your phone or you open up a website on your Computer of which literally the entire world has already. They already have it, it's already here. And so it's going to progress a lot faster than the Internet did because there was no, there's nothing kind of in the way. And so this brings us to the market. That's why when I, you know, a few days ago, I think it was a week, maybe a week ago at this point I can't, time flies like crazy. I said that this is a really good time to get in back into the memory trade. We're off 30 to 40% from the highs. I said maybe we go down another 10, 15% which we dipped another 10%. And I said at that point I'm all in. I'm very bullish. And, and even at These prices at DRAM at 59, at intel at 105, these things are going back to the highs. And I, I think that as they go back to the highs, you should probably not sit on the sidelines. I mean obviously this is not financial advice. Obviously I could be wrong. But to me the probability that the AI bubble is over is quite low. And the upside from here is another like 2 to 3x before we get something stupid. And what I always think of when I see a bubble like this and then I'll stop ranting and you can go take over. This is, this is the George Soros model. When a bubble pops, if it doesn't die, it actually comes back bigger the second time. And we just had a 40%, we just had a 40% drawdown in memory and people are still OpenAI just today announced that they're allocating even more money to, to compute, build out. People are doubling down. Kimmy, that was a little nervous. That rocked the market. The model that rocked the market ran out of compute. Even though they had a distilled smaller model, it's like they ran out of compute. We need more. It's not over. And because it's not over, to me the risk reward has shifted where I think that we can go another 2 to 3x from these prices and on the downside maybe you're looking at like minus another minus 30%. That's a really good trade. That's a really good, you know, even if you think, even if you think, let's say 2x minus 30%, even if you think it's a 50, 50 shot, you take that trade. If you think that it's 50%, we go up 2x and go back to all time highs and then surpass a little bit or you think it's 50. We draw down another 30. Still good to buy here. That's expected positive value. So I'm sitting here going, all right, time to get back into the memory trade for at least a bounce. But also stick to what I was saying before, which is what AI is going to affect downstream is really important now, and you still need to be allocated to it. And this is actually important. Like biotech, for example, in this entire massive drawdown in the markets, kind of didn't really move that much, right? Like, it moved a little. Like a lot of the stocks that we were talking about from, from when we first talked about them are still up a decent amount. Whereas, you know, from that time period to now, a lot of these memory stocks have come off quite a bit. They're down 30% since. And so basically what I've done is I've repositioned my portfolio to take advantage of this next leg of the memory trademark. But all those profits as we keep going up, I'm gonna. I'm taking them down, I'm taking them down, I'm taking them down and I'm shoving them into, you know, the, the next stage. The next stage, which I think, you know, biotech, energy, all. All these different things. So that's. That's where I am. I also think that bitcoin's going to do well, but we can get. We can come back to that.
Jonah
Yeah, we'll get to bitcoin. I mean, so much in what you just said. You told me to read Alchemy of Finance by George Soros. It influenced me as it clearly influenced you. The anatomy of a bubble is very interesting. And let's dig into it. So you said that. You said one thing that I think is factually incorrect. Most of what you said is highly, highly insightful. What you said is, hey, everybody's already downloaded this stuff on their phone. And, you know, it's a. It's a thing. So I saw a shocking, shocking chart. Brad, if you could add this to the stage. More and more households are paying for AI, okay? So I'm sure a lot of people are on the free tier, but the share of US households with paid AI subscriptions is 2.2%. Okay, that is like, I looked at this chart and I was like, how is this even possible? To me, it looks like another chart which I'm now going to share. I remember when I was a young buck. Brad, if you could swap out the image here. This is the Fred. Fred is like a Fed Data service. It's the percentage of retail Sales that are E commerce. So I remember way back in the day when I first started using Amazon, I was like, I wonder how high this Amazon stock can go. What percentage of the world's commerce is transacting online? I was having that conversation with myself back in 2004, 2005, when E commerce was 2% of total retail. Now it's like 17%. And the trajectory is just up and to the right. It's going to go to 100. Right. So let's sort of map E commerce as a thing.
Avi
Wait, wait a second, wait a second. E commerce is only. E commerce is not even 20% of total sales in the U.S. that's right.
Jonah
So what I'm getting at here, Avi,
Avi
is that actually I would have, I, I would have been so far off if you would ask me to guess
Jonah
what has Amazon stock done over the last 25 years? Is it like 100x?
Avi
I mean, basically, maybe all of, all of that is just like aws, but I mean, that's what, isn't this nuts? There's like, I feel like I, I actually think they maybe got their data wrong. I don't know. I need to look, I need to like, like double check my priors on this. I mean, they're like, like, they're probably right. I know that they're probably right, but that's shocking.
Jonah
Yeah. So basically, AI, you know, like, I,
Avi
I think, I don't know, I don't
Jonah
think free AI is going to be that useful in the long run. I think, like, you're going to have to pay for a subscription in order for it to be like, truly useful. That's a controversial statement, but needless to say, if you want to ask yourself, like, what inning of this bubble are we in? I think it's still inning number one. And if you're comfortable with the 30% drawdown, like you say, that's tremendous risk reward to be able to 2 to 3 to 5x your money for, you know, at risk of a 30% drawdown. I completely agree with you, but that's because I'm like a retail investor who's brain damaged by years. In the crypto markets, most investors cannot stomach more than a 5% drawdown or worse, a 10% drawdown before they start panic selling or before they start getting forced, stopped out. So I think this is a perfect time for anybody who's been in crypto, has risk tolerance, understands drawdowns, to just start dabbling in what I think is going to be a megatrend, just mapping it Back to E commerce, you know, paid AI, right. The real token consumers, I don't think the free tier is where most of the token consumption comes from. The real token consumers have penetrate like it's 2 to 2 and a half percent penetration of the market that's just going to go up and up and up. Eventually I think 50% of US households will have a paid subscription. 50% of global households will have a paid subscription because that'll be the way to access true intelligence. Ultimately that money will flow through to assets like Micron, to assets like msft, Meta Meta. It'll flow through to all the hyperscalers, Google. This is an investable thesis and we're on such a mega trend here that if you can stomach a little bit of a drawdown already, that puts you at an advantage versus the sort of financial incumbents and lettuce hands, uneducated retail as I'll call them, unweather, unbattle tested retail. What do you think?
Avi
I so just to clarify my point on the, to clarify my point on why I said, hey, we're actually there is a roadblock with Internet, but there's no roadblock here is that anybody can do it because everybody has a phone. Everybody can spend if they want to. As long as they have the money. You can very easily go sign up for these tools. You can very easily start using them. So the roadblock is mental. And we have to differentiate between a mental roadblock and a physical roadblock. People literally didn't have computers in 1999. There was like a large subset of society that quite literally was not connected to the Internet. They didn't have access to computers. And getting them, that hardware is far more difficult than getting somebody over the mental block of downloading AI. So that's all I'm saying in terms of the adoption and speed at which AI is going to be dispersed is that it's easier for AI to move faster. It's just much easier. That's number one. Number two is I agree with you wholeheartedly that we have, we have some ways to go now. The only question is like how do you kind of, how do you navigate what's happening right now? Like when you look at. I want to talk about Korea for a second, some of you may know, maybe some of you don't, that there was $26 billion of margin loans taken out the Korean stock market when SK Onyx and Samsung went down. 1.2 million accounts were liquidated. 1 in 30 Korean adults hit margin calls. Sorry, 1.2 million accounts hit margin calls, 300k accounts were liquidated. There was 2.3 trillion won. It's like an insane, like literally 1.5 billion, $2 billion of for selling. And a lot of people ended up insolvent. I mean the coast be fell 25%. What does that tell you? It tells you that people sort of know or they feel safe in this trend if people are willing to lever up. Generally people lever up when they feel like they, they can really make it and they have strong, in aggregate either delusional or strong conviction that this trend is going to continue to go and that they can end up making a ton of money on it. And yes, obviously they're, they're gambling, of course they're gambling as well. But in aggregate it's that they feel reasonably safe taking these bets. They don't. They're not as terrified as they should be. And that's what happens in a bubble. Right. But the difference with this bubble is that because there's underlying, there's. There's actually an underlying reason for it which is this massive productivity gain and from, from AI that that's I think still in its, in its early stages. That's going to lead to a lot of fake outs probably like the way that bitcoin traded in 2017 where you get these monster rallies, these two. Like maybe you, you rally 2x and you're off 40% and then you rally another 2x and then you're off 40% and basically your job if you're a trader is to do one of two things. You either need to just sit and hold and not do anything until you start to see, until you start to see people missing earnings. At which point you probably want to step to the side and hopefully you've held long enough that you've made money even at that point. Like you're never cleanse and expunge your mind of your peak net worth. It's very unlikely that you're ever going to maintain that in a market like this. It's probably impossible because you're probably going to come off a decent amount. Let's say earnings start to go wrong, then you start to get out of these positions and maybe you don't get back until you see earnings do well again or you see that that's been baked into the price or you try to tactically trade it, which is almost always a bad idea, but every now and then can be a good one. Right? Like, like what happened here. We were, we were sort of warning from the time that intel we were a Little early from the time that intel, like crossed 120 started trading 125, 130, we're like, okay, this is getting a little. This is getting a little nuts. Like when SanDisk, when, when Micron went up 11% post earnings in a day and then retrace the move, we're like, okay, that's a little, that's a little. You know, maybe you want to reduce positions. And, you know, I talked about raising, raising cash and sort of going to the next leg of the trade. Getting away from memory, waiting for memory to reset. So you can try to do that. I wouldn't advocate doing that with your entire stack. I'd obviously advocate doing that with a smaller. So you can, but you can try to look for these types of things, right?
Jonah
You can trade around a position, basically.
Avi
You can trade around a position. But I mean, basically we're. We're good. And I don't know, Jonah, have you, did you, did you pay attention to this Chinese versus America model fight?
Jonah
Yeah, absolutely. I've been following it kind of closely. I mean, to the best of my knowledge, it seems like a lot of Chinese model bakers have caught up with like Mythos grade AI. They're. They're basically at the frontier, or slightly behind it, which is of concern. The Chinese government has announced, you know, obviously a lot of funding for their local sort of domestic AI. They've reshored their. I think, what was it? Z AI was in Singapore. Then they reshored it to the mainland because they want, they want a stranglehold on the technology. But now there's also like some cybersecurity issues. They're worried about Mythos. They're trying to produce their own. All this, all this back channel stuff, I don't think any of it is that relevant to us as investors until the apocalypse is nigh. I have kind of like a weird view on this. I basically, I didn't have the same call as you on sandisk and Micron. I basically said, I think the memory, I think the components manufacturer bull market will continue for a long time. But I did caveat that by saying, expect, you know, insane 1999 NASDAQ style bull market volatility back to China, the fact that there's an arms race. Nobody wins an arms race except the arms makers. To me, this is just, it's something that for us as retail investors, it's a little hard to participate in. Micron stock, sandisk stock, volatile, not yet priced to perfection. You can get in, but your return on variance is Going to be difficult. China competing with the United States to make smarter AI is just going to be bullish components for a long time. But how do you express that trade? You can't really buy anthropic shares unless you do it on the private market at an insane valuation. Same with OpenAI. The components makers are already crazy volatile. Probably low sharp, but high return on capital if you can stick with it. I don't know. I like your idea of side bets on industries that will benefit from AI and this arms race, but you know, nation states, there will be no winners between America and China on this one. It's, it's just a component.
Avi
I think you also, it's also important to look elsewhere because AI is obviously, and this is something that I'm going to try to do more on this pod. I'm going to do it right here in about a second. Talk about things that other people are not necessarily, not necessarily looking at. Everyone's talking about AI. Less people are talking about the fact that we just signed a deal with Saudi Arabia to help them build nuclear plants. That's pretty cool. And this is just an extension of what's happening with uranium. As you guys have known. I've been bullish on URA for a while, but I'm starting to try to find even more downstream things that could benefit. So for example, there is, there are specific companies that benefit from actually running the reactors and enriching uranium. And as, as that, as that bet sort of plays out, I'm kind of interested in those companies specifically. There's one called Centrist which kind of looks nice, it's come off a lot. But this is, this is what you need to be doing. And I don't have a position in this yet. I'm still doing, I'm still doing some research there. I want to get a better sense of what's happening. Like what are the specific things that the US has agreed to with Saudi? Are there other deals that are currently being brokered? And will Centris be involved in foreign construction? The answer so far, I mean, like these are, these are all the types of questions that you need to ask when you're researching a single name stock. This is the kind of stuff that I think there actually might be value in because there are. I mean you talk to a lot of the PMs now at the millenniums, at the, at the citadels. Like everybody's watching AI stocks. Like the whole, the whole world is watching memory. The whole world is watching semiconductors. I actually kind of am starting to think that there's probably less attention elsewhere, which, in a world where fundamentals matter, like, if you have these mega trends that are occurring, you kind of need to start looking at these places. Right. You kind of need to start looking outside of where everybody else is looking. And so that's what I'm interested in right now is.
Jonah
Is go.
Avi
Is going over there and seeing if I can find anything, Find anything useful in. In themes that aren't necessarily being covered. Yeah. Maybe we should also talk about the fact that we're. We're bombing Iran again. There was a great headline in the Wall Street Journal, Jonah, that says, trump says US will bomb Iran's power plants if Tehran strikes ships. And it literally sounds like they're in kindergarten. Yeah, if you do this and I'll do that.
Jonah
Dude, this is literally what I. I've been talking about, like, with my wife. It. It. We have young kids, so we see them interact with each other. We see them, like, having little kid battles. And honestly, when I read the news, adults are just children. Right. We're just humans. We behave the same whether we're 3 years old or 60 years old in some respects. Maybe there's a little more superego and polish on certain politicians, not necessarily Trump, but. Yeah, this is literally like the type of fight that my son and my daughter will have. My daughter will be like, I want your toy. My son will be like, you can't have it. Then she'll take it. Then he'll punch her in the face. Right. And then she'll, like, pull his hair, and then he'll pull her hair. And that's kind of like the Iran war. Right. So I. It seems like whoever's in charge of the cruise missiles and sea mines in Iran, the head of that department, he just. He's like the child that can't help himself. He just has to keep doing the thing that you're not supposed to do. So there's going to be more sea mines, more ships exploding, and then Trump is going to have to do what Trump does. Retaliate. Pull the hair, punch in the face. I'm not being facetious, Avi. I'm literally describing what I expect to happen now. I thought this war would be off for, like, a few months or over a year maybe. It seems like it's right back on. And I don't think it's going to be over until the United States does some serious damage to Iran. I think regime change is the only way this is going to end. If you believe, as I do, that Iran was relatively close to having a weapon. And that's debatable. I think I've heard a lot of intelligent people argue that they were nowhere close, and then it's all just a big hoax, a psyop by Benjamin Netanyahu or something. But like, if you believe, as I do that the middle of the bell curve is probably where we're at with this, and they were probably going to get a nuclear weapon in a threateningly short period of time. This is all sort of inevitable. And the fact that the war has begun only makes them want to accelerate their nuclear ambitions if they hadn't already kind of been at max speed and max preparation. So my point here is this war is not going to stop. It's going to be an ongoing thing. I think the only positive takeaway is a lot of pipelines are getting built around that strait to circumvent it. Right. A lot of east west pipelines are getting built on the west side of the Gulf. And on the east side of the Gulf, it's Iran.
Avi
Right?
Jonah
Who cares?
Avi
So what this is becoming, it's becoming very clear that we need these east west pipelines built. Who wins? I mean, I'm sure there's a trade there, right?
Jonah
Probably some local Saudi pipeline company that you can't invest in directly.
Avi
I don't know. Right.
Jonah
It's a good question, though.
Avi
But this, but this probably makes Saudi more important.
Jonah
Way more important.
Avi
Like this, this is going to make Saudi Arabia, you know, if as they build this out, as we reduce dependency on the Strait of Hormuz, which is kind of, it's kind of the obvious outcome. Right. That has to happen at this point. It's actually not. It's security for everybody. It's security for China, it's security for Saudi, it's security for the US Nobody wants Iran to be able to fully control the Strait of Hormuz. And so the more that I think about it, the more that I realize that there, there are ways around everything. Always. Nothing is set in stone. Iran used its leverage point, but now it's going to lose its leverage point forever over the next five years. The Strait of Hormuz is not going to matter in 10 years based on what Iran has done now we're going to figure out how to get around it, because now it's imperative that we do. And so this is why maybe, maybe one of the reasons that oil isn't rallying ridiculously hard, or at least the long end, is not rallying very hard, because people kind of know that this is Now a short term problem, and maybe part of it is Trump sort of elongating the war to allow the markets and to allow us to digest this. Right. What do you think?
Jonah
Yeah, I think so, too. I mean, I think he was giving markets a breather. He's very sensitive to markets. He does not want his name on a Great Depression. So of course he took his foot off the. We talked about this on the podcast. Oil has a way of twisting everybody's arm. Of course he took his foot off the gas when oil started to go into the danger zone and storage levels started to go below that sort of red line that we talked about. Yeah. Now we've probably built some barrels back up and released a lot of Iranian oil. And a lot of it's really just a. It's a stock and flow problem. So now that, you know, the barrels have flown a bit again and he's sort of kicked the can down the road now, and he's also sort of learned a little bit more about the military situation on the ground and in the strait, he can have back at it. I still find it unbelievable that it's impossible for a modern navy of the United States scale to secure that strait. It blows my mind. I do not understand how it is that with all the assets we have in the region, however many millions of tons of, whatever you call it, buoyant diplomacy are floating in that strait, cannot secure it. I don't get it.
Avi
Yeah, I had a conversation with somebody about this, somebody in the military, and they reframed my mind. We tend to believe when you look at a map, you tend to be able to point at that map and say, okay, well, if we control this area in the north, and then we control this area to the northeast, and then we just track it, then we can figure out where to send our troops. The reality is we do have extremely advanced technology. We are able to track a tremendous amount of and ingest data and send people to the right places. Jonah, the world is huge. Like, just go out there and stand in a field one of these days and look as far as your eye can see. It's huge, right? Like, even New Jersey is big, and New Jersey is not that big. But compared to one human, even compared to 10,000, you just. What did you say? You're on mute.
Jonah
Sorry. I said, tune into the Thousand X podcast for insights like this. The world is big, the Jersey is big. But it looks small on a map.
Avi
It looks small on the map. It's big, man. Like, you go to Israel, Like, Israel's a tiny place on a map. It's big. Like, you know, you can't walk it in like a few hours. It's going to take days. And this is what, you know, you look at the straight over moves and you're like, look at this tiny little strip of water. And you're like, dude, it's actually kind of big. Like, how many ships? Like, if you lined up ships back to back through the Strait of Hormuz, how many ships is it going to take to cover the whole thing?
Jonah
It's a.
Avi
It's a load, man.
Jonah
You don't need to cover it with ships, obviously. No, I know that about radar and whatever they use to nuke the.
Avi
I understand that. All I'm saying is it's actually, it's way more difficult than you think.
Jonah
This blows my mind.
Avi
This is like, way more difficult than you think. And it literally is because it's like, yeah, it's actually like, kind of tough to track all this. And like, and not only that, it's hard to do that. Like, how do you know which. Like, you know, there's. There's still traffic going through straight of Hormuz. You have to have eyes on each vessel because you're like, how do you differentiate Iranian vessel versus some other vessel? Especially when the Iranian vessels are hiding themselves. Right. And you don't want to cause an international incident. It's tough out there, man. You know how long it took Ferdinand Magellan to circumnavigate the globe?
Jonah
Jonah, People call me Magellan sometimes since I'm such a good navigator with Google Maps. But yeah, yeah, yeah, I know how to read.
Avi
Who's bad with Google Maps?
Jonah
No comment. Anyway, you know.
Avi
Sorry, sorry, sorry, Orly, I didn't mean to drag you through the mod on the podcast.
Jonah
My point here, Avi, is like, this is all going to get resolved. I do not think we're going to see a crazy spike in oil prices. I do not think this Iran war is going to derail the markets. It's very clear that, like, whoever's imposing, like, from, from day one on this podcast, we said that the person who created the problem has control of the problem. That is Donald Trump.
Avi
Right, Right.
Jonah
And he's so markets focused that whenever markets become a problem, he will, as a result of the problem he started in Iran, he will just exercise control over that problem, release some tension, let markets sell off, let stocks build, as we say in oil land, which means, like, let inventories be replenished, tanks be refilled, and then he'll just have right back at it. But, you know, once again, just the final point. If you believe as I do, that Iran is close to having a nuclear weapon and that that cannot be allowed, which seems to be Trump's opinion. Otherwise he wouldn't be bothering with this and risking his reputation on it. This war is not going to stop. It's just going to. This skirmish will continue until the hardliner who's in the man behind the guy behind the guy till he's dead and the guy behind him is dead, and so on and so forth until there's regime change. It's the only way. They will never, they will never give up their nuclear ambitions unless they pivot to either like the pre Ayatollah sort of monarchy situation with the Shah, or they just pivot to full democracy. And that's a big ask. And it's going to take time.
Avi
They're never going to pivot. Did you see, did you see that? Apparently, Israeli intelligence cultivated Ahmadinejad.
Jonah
Yeah, I thought that was awesome.
Avi
So Ahmadinejad is the former president of Iran, the number one public enemy in the eyes of Israelis because he had some pretty fiery rhetoric. And it's insane because apparently post basically what happened, and this is a lesson to everybody, basically he wanted to run for president again and he wasn't able to. And the ayatollah sort of pushed him out. And he became very bitter about this. And so he decided, well, the enemy of my enemy, who's now the Ayatollahs, because the Ayatollah is made enemy with him, enemy of an enemy is my friend. So he, he asked to be set up with the Israelis. He gets set up with them, and the Israelis go, this is brilliant. We can have an inside man. I think the New York Times reported this. Good job, New York Times. He finally did something right for a change. Although they reported it totally negatively, but whatever, it's totally insane. Like, they actually recruited this guy and they were going to try to install him, but then at some point, once the hostility started, he ended up getting cold feet. He didn't make it fast enough to some safe zone. Something ended up happening. And then the Iranians ended up capturing him and figuring out that this was all going on. So he's kind of out of the picture now. But it also just goes to show that there is a lot, there are a lot of games being played right now. And I do think that there was a. I mean, in hindsight, obviously, this is kind of obvious. There was a miscalculation on behalf of the US and Israel, I think that they thought that they would be able to install a leader more quickly, or like, maybe it's possible that he was actually sort of the key component of the plan, that if they had managed to install him or if he.
Jonah
If.
Avi
If they knocked out the leadership, then he was actually in the line of succession and he would have been installed. And then they found out that he was communicating with the Israelis. I think that, like Occam's razor, that's probably kind of what went wrong, is they had a plan and it sort of just fell apart because I don't think, like, the likes, the outcome of the war was not great so far. And so I actually don't think that the US would have gone in and started this war unless they had a plan to end the war reasonably quickly with a good outcome. So clearly the plan went wrong. And one day there's going to be a good book about what exactly went wrong and what exactly they were trying to do that didn't quite work out. And I'm excited to read it. Hopefully written by somebody good and not somebody.
Jonah
But, yeah, I want to read that book, too. But markets wise, I think.
Avi
I think, but markets wise. Market wise. We're safe. Markets wise. Don't worry so much. Markets wise. I'm looking at the markets and I'm thinking to myself, wow, today is a really nice day. Not much is happening in the market. You look at NASDAQ down 40 bips, nothing really happening. You look at Graham, down one and a half percent, that's totally fine. You look at Zec, down 4%. Okay, something's happening. You look at Bitcoin, down a percent, kind of nothing happening. For the first time ever in, like, weeks, kind of we're stabilizing. And that's, I think, a very good sign for the markets. I was getting a little bit concerned at the high volume. I think we need to reset, we need to regroup, and then the markets can keep going up. Now, the thing that actually looks the best to me right now, Jonah, you're going to hate this. It's gold. Gold actually looks phenomenal.
Jonah
It's.
Avi
I know. I know you do. Gold is off. Gold is off 26% from the highs. And you can look at gold miners, too, because gold miners are going to be a good bet. But gold's based basically, for all six weeks we've gone, we've gone sideways effectively. And I think right now it's actually looking. If the markets calm down, you know, you have. I think you probably Have a rotation back. Like if memory goes nowhere for a week, even two weeks, I think you can get a rotation back to gold. You can get a rotation back to Bitcoin, you can get a rotation to these things that have been far off the highs for a long time that do have long term value propositions that people are going to start reality sort of reallocating to a portfolio, to their portfolio. You guys really need to start showing charts too. Yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm too technologically inept to do that.
Jonah
You can share your screen and, and click on Trading View and then just click around and it sort of show us what you're, what you're thinking. That would be helpful. But yeah, I agree. Yeah. Look, like I, I'm starting to look at crypto and I think that that may be, I think we may be getting out of the woods a little bit. It seems like the cl, the odds of the Clarity act passing are starting to tick back up. There's some back and forth. Seems to be actually like, there seems to be a will in Washington to pass that which I think would be bullish. The rest of the market is kind of meh to me. I don't see any like screaming trades here. But crypto, aside from Saylor being sailor, I think crypto may have bottomed out like temporarily, which is a relief because it's still a, you know, significant part of my portfolio that I care about. I, as far as gold is concerned, I don't understand what drives gold. That's why I always stay away from it. Technically, I was the head of a precious metals desk for a while. I let the guys do their thing. I never really understood why they were doing what they were doing. It's just, I feel kind of stupid when it comes to gold. Like, what, What Avi, what gives you the impression that the number one driver of gold, which is central banks, what gives you the impression that they're going to start accumulating again? That's literally all that matters.
Avi
That is, that is quite literally all that matters. And I think that, well, number, number one, Japan is actually facing some inflationary pressures right now and they might look to shore up their gold reserves. So that could be, that could be good for it. But also, candidly, Jonah, the chart looks really nice. Like that's just, that's like, honestly, I'm not gonna, I'm actually just not gonna over intellectualize this. That's a good looking chart. Excuse my French. I mean, basically we, we're straight back at that 4K level that we've defended for six weeks now. It's kind of just looking good. Like, let's put some, let's click that. Put some moving average.
Jonah
Let's see weekly candles.
Avi
Let's put some simple moving averages on it. This, this is weekly.
Jonah
Okay.
Avi
Let's do, let's do year. Let's do a one week. Let's do. Or, sorry, seven week. Let's do a 14. Let's do 52, because that's a year 714. So when I flip back today, it's good. I'm going to go to the, to the daily. Like, yeah, I mean, maybe, maybe what you want to do is you want to wait for it. Like, if you're, if you're feeling scared, maybe what you want to do is you want to wait for it to get above 4300, which is the, the yearly, the yearly moving average, and you want to wait for that as your signal to get in. But like, that 4k level is looking quite strong to me. And not only that, not only that. I mean, you can target. If you're, if you're conservative, you can target the previous, the previous level, the previous resistance level, which is around 4, 800, and then stop out. I mean, that's a great risk reward right there. I mean, look at that. That's. For those of you.
Jonah
This type of analysis just breaks my brain. And it does. I know. Because it's gold. Like, there's. I know.
Avi
Obviously you're like, I actually probably wouldn't do this with stocks at all ever. But with gold, it's kind of the way that you do it. Like, you kind of have to trade gold technically. I mean, I, I would never, ever pull up, like, I would never pull up like a memory. Like, I don't, I don't care about this chart. Like, this, this chart kind of means nothing to me. I don't think you can glean a lot of information from it, to be completely honest. I mean, like, this is intel. Like, I just don't think that you're going to glean a lot from it because there's just, there's so much that goes into this.
Jonah
Avi. Avi. Yeah, There are, there are literally dozens or maybe even hundreds of like teenage teenagers on YouTube that stream technical analysis crap. The reason why, like, you're right, gold has no fundamentals. It's just flows. So maybe technical analysis is the right way to slice the cake there. I just. For me, the problem is like, ooh, 4,000 is a good level. It's bounced off of 4,000 a bunch of times and we're at 4,000 again. So let me buy some there. I guess if you have a tight stop and it goes a bit lower and you sell, then you're safe.
Avi
Well, I mean it's as simple as this.
Jonah
Think about this.
Avi
Central banks that buy are made up of people that are from those countries. There are 190 countries in the world. I mean obviously China, Japan, like these people that are accumulating gold, Jonah, they're not that, they're not like that smart, like they literally are going to buy it. That's why I like technical analysis on gold. Because technical analysis, like the gold market is actually driven by low inform, like low information people. It's the people making decisions to like shore up reserves or sell them. And that's pretty low information and quite literally is often determined based on price level. Right. Like, like it's not.
Jonah
Gold is a reflexive asset, I'll give you that.
Avi
Gold going up gold is a reflexive. Exactly. And like the idea that people like the idea that people are going to buy gold at 4k and send it up is actually not stupid. Whereas like if you tried to do technical analysis on Nvidia, like you know, maybe go go, like go go see a doctor or something like that because you're not going to get anywhere. But you know, I think, I think for gold it's actually quite useful.
Jonah
You got to pick and choose. My one caveat to that would be if gold is selling off, which it's currently in a downtrend, hasn't stabilized or anything. People who are reflexive buyers don't want to buy when something's going down. All they care about is buying when it's going up because they're afraid it'll go higher. They don't care about catching and that's
Avi
why that support level is so important.
Jonah
Yeah. So basically buy gold here with a tight stop. Like if it goes. If your hypothesis, if your thesis on the market is 4,000 and that's just that one number and that's the only. It's not like a 63 page fundamental thesis. It's just one word, 4,000, one number and then it breaks that number like your thesis has been disproven, the hypothesis is moot, so you have to sell. So yeah, I guess you could buy with a tight stop. What I wouldn't do is buy here because it looks like it's stabilized at 4,000 a bunch of times and then just sit idly by while gold burns and crashes downwards. Because, you know, like, bitcoin gold is reflexive and sellers beget more selling and buyers beget more buying. Sort of how it works.
Avi
As always, guys, none of this is financial advice. Good luck out there. I will. I will be back. I will be back on Friday with
Jonah
a very special guest with it.
Avi
Well, hopefully with a very. I mean, well, let's see. We've promised him before, but let's see, let's see.
Jonah
We got him once.
Avi
It'll be good.
Jonah
We got him once before. He was a big superstar.
Avi
Yeah. Shabbat Shalom as.
Jonah
Let's go.
Avi
Who's clearly not Jew. You're clearly not Jewish.
Jonah
It's okay. Respect. Thank you for.
Avi
How dare you appropriate my culture?
Jonah
Thank you for being an ally and saying Shabbat shalom on a Wednesday.
Avi
Yeah, thank you. All right. Actually, today's Tisha of. I don't know if you know that tonight. Tonight, the Tisha B'Av is where we commemorate the destruction of our two temples. The first one by the Assyrians, the second Babylonians. Assyrians, same thing. And the second one by the Romans. Very sad. We fast.
Jonah
I'm eating some food right now just
Avi
to prepare for it.
Jonah
Tomorrow's.
Avi
Yeah.
Jonah
Hungry day.
Avi
I'm pretty starving. What should I. What should I go get?
Jonah
It's New York City. Get the. Get the finest food in America. Get some sushi or something.
Avi
Yeah, I could go for some sushi, actually. Is there anything else that's on your mind, Jonah? Like, is it like, what's on your mind? Maybe we can, you know, maybe we should, like, end the podcast with like, what. What. What's Jonah thinking about?
Jonah
Honestly, the Thousand X Pod is becoming my favorite podcast. I'm not featured on a lot of it anymore, so it's not like I was there to see it happen. So I've started tuning in more and Great job, AI. I'm loving it. Loving the content.
Avi
Don't forget, if you're watching right now and you want us to continue to bring you content, go, like, go subscribe. Like, seriously, guys, like, like, like subscribe on YouTube. I hate to do this, but just go.
Jonah
I'll do it.
Avi
Subscribe right now. Help us subscribe because it's actually stupidly important for us because I, I'm. I am making this my full time job now. Kind of feel like I feel like a panhandler. Please, please give me your. Like, please give me your. Please give me your. Subscribe, sir.
Jonah
Panhandler. What a great name. Anyway, that's the sum of my mind. I think you're doing a great job. I love the content. I love how you're bringing on trading giants. I know you. We haven't published one of the episodes, but.
Avi
No, one of the episodes. It's really, actually really cool, is I ended up talking to this guy who I'm going to. I'll. I'll let you guys know who I'm going to because you guys are listening. I'm going to let you guys in on a little secret. Little secret here. We interviewed the former CEO and founder of Signature bank, which was, I think, the largest bank ever seized by the US Government. And holy shit, I tried to get him to name who seized the bank from him. He wouldn't do it. But he did tell me some other really interesting stories, including the fact that he. Including the fact that he worked with Lou Ranieri, who's featured in Liars Poker. Great book by Michael Lewis. It's going to be a good episode. More importantly for all those people out there that are asking, are you like, what's going on? Where are you guys going? Don't worry, we're not going to stop with the live streams. We're not going to stop. In fact, we're going to do even more live streams, but we are also going to pick up on the interviews and that's going to be fun. So if you tune into both, then you really support us and then I can really spend a lot of time on it because the most important thing here is that I need your. I need you to give me dopamine. If you're listening to this, I need you to give me. That's why I'm doing this. I'm doing this because I am a whore for attention and I need your dopamine.
Jonah
Well, on those good words, maybe we should end it for today. It's been a good stream. Avi, love seeing you. As always, it's hard to produce content in a meth market, but I feel like we pretty much cover the bases here. Iran, whatever, AI probably still going, but could crash before it rips. So stay safe out there, guys.
Avi
Don't. Yeah, don't forget those famous words. Can crash before it rips.
Jonah
Yeah. Cool.
Avi
All right, see you guys. Foreign.
Jonah
Nothing said on the Thousand X podcast is a recommendation to buy or sell any investments or products. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely their opinions, not financial advice or necessarily the views of one KX Media. Our hosts, guests, and one KX news team may hold positions in the company's funds or projects discussed.
Hosts: Avi Felman & Jonah Van Bourg
Theme: Assessing whether the “memory trade” has bottomed, the state of AI adoption and its market implications, bubbles, macro geopolitics, and how to position for the next phase in the markets.
This episode dives into the intersecting themes of market cycles in memory and tech hardware, the explosive (yet early) adoption curve of AI, strategic investing amid volatility, and the broader macro backdrop—from the effects of COVID-era monetary expansion to current geopolitical tensions in the Gulf. Avi and Jonah alternate between tactical trade advice and big-picture macroanalysis, sharing both quant and narrative insights delivered with wit and candor.
“I remember when I was a young buck… E-commerce was 2% of total retail. Now it’s like 17%. And the trajectory is just up and to the right. It’s going to go to 100.” ([15:49], Jonah)
Avi lays out the context for memory hardware stocks (Micron, SK Hynix, Intel, etc.) suffering a 30-40% drawdown, and argues the correction is healthy:
“That's why… I said that this is a really good time to get back into the memory trade. We're off 30 to 40% from the highs… and at these prices… these things are going back to the highs.” ([08:18], Avi)
The “Soros bubble” model: When a bubble collapses but doesn’t die, it often comes back bigger. Avi and Jonah align on the premise that the AI bubble is nowhere near over ([08:57]).
Portfolio strategy: Avi rotates profits from “memory” into what he sees as downstream beneficiaries of AI (biotech, energy, etc.) ([12:45]).
Monetary policy’s impact on prices
“The adoption and pace of AI is much faster actually than the Internet… There’s no hardware roadblock… it’s going to progress a lot faster.” ([08:04], Avi)
Jonah and Avi discuss U.S.-China competition in AI, with China making strides and both countries massively investing in compute ([23:51]).
Korean Margin Calls: Avi tells a cautionary tale of extreme leverage in Korea’s memory stocks—1.2 million accounts hit margin calls, but this also signals strong forward conviction in the sector’s secular trend ([18:33]).
“I actually am starting to think that there’s probably less attention elsewhere…if you have these mega trends… you kind of need to start looking outside of where everybody else is looking.” ([27:32], Avi)
Middle East Tension: The hosts discuss renewed U.S.–Iran hostilities, likening geopolitical maneuvers to children squabbling over toys ([28:18], Jonah).
Energy Security: Both reflect on how disruption in the Strait of Hormuz is pushing rapid investment in east-west pipelines and reducing strategic vulnerability ([31:19]).
Why the U.S. can’t secure the Strait: Unexpected military and logistical complexity—“The world is big. The Jersey is big. But it looks small on a map.” ([35:17], Jonah, Avi)
Gold has come off 26% from its highs. Avi is bullish, primarily on technicals, seeing potential for a bounce if the market calms down ([42:13], Avi).
Jonah is skeptical (“What drives gold?”), but grants that technical trading makes more sense in gold than in stocks due to its reflexive nature ([44:36], Jonah).
Crypto: Jonah thinks crypto may be bottoming out, points to possible regulatory clarity. Avi believes rotation back into crypto and gold could happen if “memory” stalls ([43:16], [44:36]).
On AI adoption:
On speculative mistakes vs. long-term investing:
On geopolitical childishness:
On technicals in gold:
Conversational, humorous, and occasionally self-deprecating—combining sharp analytical perspectives with market savvy, laced with irreverent banter and analogies to everyday life and history.
This episode offers a nuanced, high-level take on the intersecting narratives of tech adoption, market cycles, and geopolitical risk, carved into actionable investing frameworks. If you’re curious whether the memory trade has truly bottomed and how to play the next wave of the AI/tech revolution in both hardware and downstream beneficiaries—without getting whipsawed by volatility—this episode distills the essential signals from the market noise, with wit and insider savvy, covering everything from portfolio rotation and risk psychology to the unintended consequences of great power antics in the Middle East.