SpaceX 话题告一段落，美联储会议落幕，接下来是什么？

The reality is that crypto revenue for Robinhood was down 47% in Q1, but everything else is doing ridiculously well, right? Platform assets are up 50% year over year. Gold subscribers were up 36% in Q1 and are probably going to continue to go up. They’re rolling out agent trading to all users. They cut 10% of their workforce, which, again, you’re going to see happening across the board, whether it’s in finance, software, or manufacturing. Once the humanoid robots come, workforces are going to get cut.

The thing that you have to remember is that that is not bearish; that’s bullish. Money doesn’t just disappear—money gets reallocated. For every dollar that you save from an engineer getting fired, you’re going to reallocate to marketing, you’re going to reallocate to other areas, you’re going to maybe reallocate to share buybacks, reallocate to the shareholders, or reallocate to compensation for the top C-suite or the people who are left. That’s going to end up with more spending, so that’s going to be pretty good. I’m fairly certain that we’re all going to be pretty happy by the end of the summer.

1. The Market Doesn't Care About Warsh

What’s up, guys? Happy Juneteenth. It is Friday, June 19th, and I’m here today very happy and very excited because the market just absolutely ripped, and then we got a holiday today. It’s kind of nice. It has been a crazy week. So much has happened.

We’ve got SpaceX ripping. We had our FOMC meeting. We got Kevin Warsh finally getting up there and giving his presser. He sounded a little hawkish, but the market just doesn’t care. That’s sort of the beauty of the whole thing.

The market is a weighing tool, as we all know. What does that mean? Well, we sort of figure out what’s going to happen in the future. We predict the probabilities of what the future is going to look like. We don’t necessarily react to exactly what’s going on.

2. Why Mag 7 Is Lagging The Semis

The market reacts to what it thinks the future is going to look like. For a while, up until we actually got the decision today and the presser from Kevin Warsh, the market started realizing, “Hey, with rising inflation and rising CPI, we might actually get rate hikes.” That started being priced into the curve. It started being priced into the forward curve, and the market, I think, struggled to go up for a little bit and had a few sell-offs because of that.

Then what ends up happening is that the dot plot comes out, we’re pricing in 1 hike through the end of the year, and the market says, “Well, that’s kind of what we expected.” Everything that’s been driving the market—all of the megatrends that have been happening—is actually continuing to happen. So what is there to be worried about, right?

If Intel keeps printing money, if Apple and the Magnificent 7 keep printing money and investing in CapEx—which they are—the Magnificent 7 is actually performing poorly, but that is specifically because of the dynamic that they’re selling their equity and raising debt in order to fund CapEx buildout. Of course, what’s going to happen there is that their equities are going to struggle relative to the semis, relative to the stuff that they’re buying with that money.

You kind of need to understand that. If you’re going to raise $100 billion through debt and equity to invest in data centers, you probably want to buy the things that they’re buying, not what they’re selling, right? What they’re selling is their equity, and what they’re buying are semiconductors.

What’s happening right now in the market is just a return to normalcy. We had a lot of fears in the market with the Iran war, rising oil, inflation, potentially weak earnings, and the SpaceX IPO being a liquidity moment for the markets—none of which really ended up materializing.

Now I think we’re probably in a Goldilocks period, especially because things tend to slow down over the summer. We’re probably going to get less major news. Maybe we’ll get an Anthropic IPO. Maybe we’ll get an OpenAI IPO, which we can talk about later.

For now, what we’re seeing is that things look relatively normal. We’re seeing things look relatively good, and I’m pretty confident that over the next 2 months—at least until August or September—we’re probably going to see continued performance from everything that has been performing so far.

That’s your Intels of the world, your SanDisks of the world, your Microns of the world. These things are just going to continue to rip, and I’m honestly pretty excited to be in these positions over the foreseeable future.

3. Layoffs Are Bullish, Not Bearish

You’re also seeing it across the board. Hood has started to do really well. We’ve talked about that on previous podcasts. I continuously think that Hood is probably the better play rather than Hyperliquid. I think Hyperliquid is getting dragged down by the broader crypto complex, or held back by the broader crypto complex, just because there are a lot of cross-asset holders there.

Obviously, I’m a Hyperliquid bull, but the reality is that crypto revenue for Robinhood was down 47% in Q1. Everything else is doing ridiculously well, right? Platform assets are up 50% year over year. I think they’re at $400 billion now. Gold subscribers were up 36% in Q1 and are probably going to continue to go up.

They’re rolling out agent trading to all users. They cut 10% of their workforce, which, again, you’re going to see happening across the board, whether it’s in finance, software, or manufacturing. Once the humanoid robots come, workforces are going to get cut.

The thing that you have to remember is that that is not bearish; that’s bullish. Money doesn’t just disappear—money gets reallocated. For every dollar that you save from an engineer getting fired, you’re going to reallocate to marketing, you’re going to reallocate to other areas, you’re going to maybe reallocate to share buybacks, reallocate to the shareholders, or reallocate to compensation for the top C-suite or the people who are left. That’s going to end up with more spending, so that’s going to be pretty good.

I’m fairly certain that we’re all going to be pretty happy by the end of the summer. Make sure you get out there. Make sure you get invested in the market. Make sure that you’re invested in the right thing so that you can go spend your money. Remember, it’s extremely important.

Maybe the most important thing that you can do as an American to celebrate the 250th anniversary of America is make sure you spend your money. Make sure that your money gets injected into the economy, circulates, supports small businesses, and gets out there. If you’ve made a lot of money this year, make sure you’re spending it, because that’s how the economy keeps going. If you stop spending, the economy goes down.

It’s good for your bags, I think, to spend frivolously. It’s actually a very good thing. You should consider doing that.

Regardless of what the market is saying, prices are still going up. People were talking about how oil prices are coming down, and a big part of the CPI inflation was obviously oil prices going up because of the Iran war.

It’s kind of interesting. I’m personally seeing the impact of prices in New York. You go out for a meal now—I went to Joe & The Juice the other day, just walking down the street. I love Joe & The Juice. This is not a paid ad; I just love them. They’re great.

They’ve got this new smoothie called the Miami Glow. It’s blue. You’ve got to love a blue smoothie. I go in and order a sandwich and a smoothie, and it comes out to $38. That’s just nuts. I’m sitting here thinking, there is significant inflation in the market right now.

This is not going to end well in 5 years, in 6 years, or in 7 years. Maybe you’ll see it reflected in the midterms. Probably not. It’s more likely that you’ll see it reflected in the presidential election if this keeps going.

People who are not in the top half of the K, people who are not in the top 20% of earners, are still struggling pretty mightily out there. That’s something to pay attention to.

As we’ve talked about on previous podcasts, that’s probably the largest risk to forward market appreciation: having people realize, “Okay, wow, the bottom half is really struggling, and we’re going to need to redistribute some capital.”

Andrew Yang was kind of on top of it from the beginning, talking about how AI was going to introduce the need for UBI.

4. Saylor Used ChatGPT To Build STRC

And again, that's kind of what's happening right now: AI is obviously sucking up a ton of the productivity, and the top 10% of people are now 300 times more productive than the bottom 50%. That means they're just going to suck up even more capital, and that's obviously going to lead to some issues, potentially some social issues, but we don't have to think about that right now. That's not something we necessarily have to worry about. I want to answer some questions here.

We've got truth2224 in the stream saying, “What do you think of STRC going down to 82.61?” For those of you who don't know, STRC is the Michael Saylor Bitcoin savings account. It was issuing an 11% dividend to holders of this thing, and basically the way he was funding it was either by selling equity—he's selling his MSTR, basically—to accumulate a cash stack and then use that to pay out dividends, which is compressing the premium of MicroStrategy.

That's tough because we're kind of in a spiral right now. He's either going to need to pause the dividend, which of course is going to send STRC down even more, or he's going to need to reduce the dividend, or he's going to need to sell an exceptional amount of BTC in order to cover his debt obligations. I don't know if you guys saw that viral clip of Michael Saylor quite literally talking about how he used ChatGPT to construct the structure of STRC, and that in itself is just bad.

That's obviously not smart, because ChatGPT is just going to go, “Wow, Michael, brilliant job. Really, really smart. You're for sure going to work. There's no way that this goes wrong.” It's a little bit sycophantic. I think what we're experiencing now is that he should have used Claude instead of ChatGPT. That's true. He should have.

If he'd used Claude, maybe we wouldn't have been in this mess. If he'd used Grok, we probably would have been in this mess a long time ago. ChatGPT might be the worst because it's right in the middle. If we'd used Grok, we would have blown up. If we'd used Claude, Bitcoin would have been at $500K a coin. Because we used ChatGPT, we're just cooked. Everything's over now. That's obviously not great.

I think the biggest issue here is that he has no exit other than basically suspending his operations. Instead of just buying Bitcoin, he could have used all that money to refinance his debt. With all the equity issuance that he's done over the last 6 months, instead of buying Bitcoin, he probably should have had the foresight to realize that a lot of this comes due in 2027 and that we need to take care of it now. Otherwise, we're going to be in trouble in 1 year.

If we're going to have a dividend that we need to pay out at least biweekly or something like that, we're obviously going to need to raise cash to be able to do that. His response was just to buy more Bitcoin until it became untenable, and then he was like, “Okay, I guess we have to go sell some Bitcoin now.” That's obviously not ideal.

If I'm you, I'm probably just not touching BTC. That's kind of what the street realizes. Intel just ripped to all-time highs because they signed a deal with Apple to supply them with chips and actually manufacture even more chips in the United States. The whole semiconductor complex is just continuously up.

What people are starting to realize is that things are coming back to the United States. Even though this Iran deal, which we'll talk about in a second, was not great, it was not great for Israel, and it was not great, I think, for the United States. It was phenomenal for Iran. Iran sort of ran away with that one.

Even though we had a snafu in Iran, the U.S. economy is absolutely rocketing ahead. There was this thesis at the beginning of the year that ended up being completely incorrect: emerging markets were going to do very well. The thesis was, “Okay, emerging markets are going to—2026 is going to be the year of the emerging market.” You saw that with people talking about Brazil and Korea.

Korea has still done very well because Korea is exclusively driven by the 1 industry that is doing well, which is the semiconductor industry. The rest of it basically fell by the wayside as people realized that the only place to invest in true innovation and what's driving the economy is the United States. All of that is coming out of the United States.

This is obviously what people need to be paying attention to: the United States is the place to be. That's strengthening the dollar, which is obviously bad for gold, bad for Bitcoin, and bad for commodities in general. That was a big thesis for a decent amount of time. We're going to need to reconsolidate assets into the United States. If you're still exposed to that EM thesis, that's definitely not where you should be.

5. The Iran Deal Was A Win For Iran

The Iran deal was something that was born, I think, out of fear. Trump is sitting there and going, “Okay, the main reason I think that he went into Iran in the first place is because he was riding high off of the Venezuela deal. He goes, ‘Okay, I did such a good job with Venezuela. My advisors were so correct. Everyone was so right that this was a good idea. I bet Iran's going to be a really simple operation as well.’”

He realized that he had sort of gotten stuck in a quagmire. It's like, “I had greater faith in the Israeli intelligence services. I had greater faith in the way that the Trump administration was going to handle it,” and they kind of just didn't handle it properly. It still remains to be seen, because if you look, the entire leadership of Iran has been taken out. Potentially, they're governed more by moderates now.

Generally across the board, it looks like this memorandum of understanding, even if signed and moved forward, is not really going to advance the interests of the United States or Israel. It's definitely going to advance the interests of Iran. What that means to me is that this is a very untenable situation, and it's a situation that's going to lead to future conflict.

I don't necessarily think that there's going to be future conflict in the next 1 month, 2 months, or 3 months, but potentially come September or October, if things start to look shaky again—if Hezbollah decides to launch rockets at Israel and Israel decides to respond—that's obviously going to torch the deal. That's going to lead to another spike in oil prices, and that's maybe going to cause another tumble in the markets.

Until then, I think that right now Trump is really trying to put this behind him. Even if this particular MOU, as the Notorious Big Bull says, is cooked, I think there's a lot of incentive from the administration, especially heading into the midterms, to make sure that this doesn't flare up. Potentially, after the midterms, we get another flare-up, and that's going to send the markets tumbling again. Until then, I think we're good to go.

I didn't see whether the MOU already says the Strait of Hormuz closes again. I didn't see that. If it is, type in the comments and let me know. Hopefully not, because obviously that was a big boon for the markets. Maybe there's more gyrations to come.

6. The Next Megatrend: AI Biotech

Yeah, guys, I don't know what else to say. This has actually been kind of a slow week. What I'm really excited for is diving into biotech. I sent a note to Martin Shkreli, the king of biotech. I'm like, “Hey, man, how do I un-retard myself when it comes to biotech?”

There's this news that came out that Midjourney is releasing this device that's going to perform more scans than the entirety of all MRIs in the United States, and I thought that was crazy. This is the first time that I've seen AI actually be applied to a physical product as opposed to just coding. This has been a big issue with AI, at least from my personal perspective.

7. The $14 Smoothie: Inflation Is Real

David Orr tweeted out something that I thought was very prescient. He's like, “Well, AI is really just revolutionizing the world of software right now.” While I do believe that AI is obviously going to revolutionize a lot of different areas, including drug discovery, and it's going to power robotics—I mean, you saw Accenture going down 30%—it's going to revolutionize the world of drones performing work for consulting companies and investment bankers. Analysts are going to be on suicide watch soon.

This is the first real physical product that I've seen come out that I thought was extremely compelling. It's a very compelling product. The question is whether it will work, right? Right now, we don't know. I have no idea.

It might work. It might not work. But at least it’s being tried. At least they raised 70 million for it to be tried, and something like Butterfly Therapeutics went up 33% on the news. I mean, guys, this is where we have to be paying attention, right? If we know that AI is going to revolutionize biotech, and we know that new devices and new drugs are going to be discovered, we have to dig into this.

The other confluence here is that the FDA is a lot more lax, courtesy of RFK, than it’s ever been before. Here’s a stat: On June 17th, the FDA pulled a full U-turn on gene therapy, and the stock called Unicure Huntington went up vertically, 80%. I think this is going to start happening more because the FDA is more willing to bend itself for these new types of treatments that are coming out. I’m starting to research more companies that might actually benefit a lot from this.

One of them is Insilico Medicine. It’s based in Boston, Massachusetts. It trades on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, and its drug discovery is entirely AI-generated—it uses AI specifically and only to generate new drugs. I thought that was very compelling. It’s sort of a pure-play approach to what’s going on.

I’m pretty bullish on the world of biotech. I’m not an expert. I’m going to spend the next few weeks diving in for you guys, the listeners, and I’m going to try to figure out the best possible place here. But one potential play—because this is what George Soros says, this is what Druckenmiller says, this is what all these major guys say—is that if you have an idea, you have to allocate a little bit and then do the research.

It actually is a great way, in my opinion, to really make sure that you are invested in something: put a little money on it. What I did is I bought ARKG, which is the ARK Revolutionary Genomics ETF, run by our girl Cathie Wood. I bought a little bit of that and put about 3% of the portfolio in ARKG. I’m going to increase exposure to genomics, and I’m going to increase exposure to biotech. I’m absolutely going to do it, but I need to do more research so that I can tell you guys what’s actually going on in this world.

We have all these forces swirling, but the reality is that when it comes to megatrends, you just have to hop on. You have to make bets, and you have to ride the volatility, because regardless of what happens—even if, God forbid, knock on wood, we go back to war with Iran tomorrow—that’s not going to stop biotech companies from pushing out drugs.

There was a bad take on TBPN about this today that I saw bouncing around the internet. I like the TBPN guys, don’t get me wrong. They’re good guys, but they come out there and say, “What people don’t understand about AI is that it actually probably isn’t going to solve these health issues by itself. What’s going to happen is what’s happening with Midjourney: some people get rich, and then they reallocate their money toward solving these problems.”

And that’s not what’s happening. We are genuinely discovering new drugs. We are genuinely discovering new ways to monitor health. We are advancing the study of human biology and uncovering new things every day because of AI. The data set of humanity and biology is so massive and so large, and it’s so computationally intensive to uncover things, that it’s extremely useful to have AI.

There’s this take that you can’t get new insights out of data that’s already been analyzed. What I’m trying to say is that’s actually the complete opposite, right? There’s just far too much data out there, and it’s kind of like the ocean: we have way too much data that we actually haven’t really analyzed. The comments are all saying, “You’ve got to look at Jordy Visser.” I’m going to go watch his weekly videos, because I do think that this is the next megatrend.

8. Nuclear & The Rotation To Physical AI

If I’m going to take a step back and talk to you guys about megatrends—about what you need to be looking into heading into the weekend—there was an article in the Financial Times today, or yesterday, about the Trump administration’s “nuclear bros.” Terrible headline. They like to call everybody “bro.” This is a huge issue. They’re just like, “Anything that the Trump administration does, anything that the conservatives do, it’s just full of these sketchy bros: crypto bros, nuclear bros, defense bros.”

I’m like, “Well, I don’t know. Being a nuclear bro sounds actually pretty fun to me. I’m kind of down for people innovating in the world of nuclear energy.” What’s happening is that there are a lot of new companies popping up, trying to build new types of reactors—more efficient reactors, safer reactors, better reactors for nuclear energy.

That’s not necessarily going to drive uranium prices higher, because you can always increase production if you’re mining. Remember, if you’re mining an asset, you’re mining a commodity, and you expect the usage for that commodity to expand, you can’t just look at the actual commodity price. It’s possible that these companies, if demand goes up 10x, invest 10x into their mining operations and actually mine 20x of the commodity itself. Their revenue would be 20x, but the actual commodity price might go down. There’s just more of it being produced.

That’s how commodities work. I would never advocate for anybody to bet directly on commodity prices, except for gold, which has more of a steady rate. If you wanted to mine more gold, you really couldn’t do that effectively, because that’s just the way gold is. We’re sort of at max capacity for that.

But when it comes to things like uranium, we could step up, especially, obviously, if Russia ever comes back online—if we ever end that war. That’s going to be bad for uranium prices, but it might be very good for uranium companies that enrich uranium, especially companies in the United States.

That’s why URA is so great. Companies that mine uranium will expand their revenues, and this is really good, because I think there’s going to be a nuclear revolution in the United States in the next, call it, 3–5 years. You’re going to be very happy with your URA investment. It’s actually off a ton from the highs.

Remember when I said that I de-risked a little bit? Now I’m back in the market. I was buying uranium, buying Intel, buying the semiconductors, and what I’m fully confident in is that this is going to be a massive narrative at some point in the next 3–5 years. You’re probably going to get a 3–5x out of it.

What I’m looking at, and what you guys probably need to look at heading into the weekend, is biotech and nuclear. If you spend your weekend on those 2 things, I think we’re probably going to come out with some pretty interesting scenarios. I think we’ll probably make some good money.

We’re probably going to wrap it up here, because this is supposed to be a short stream today, just 30 minutes heading into the weekend. I’ll leave you with this, which is a very important question. Jaws asked, “Do you buy into the idea that capital wants to rotate from the digital world to the physical world?”

Absolutely, 100% it does. This is not only a reaction to what happened during COVID, where everything moved online. This is just a general reaction to the way that the world has worked over the last 15–20 years. Basically, since Facebook got big, since social media got big, the vast majority of capital has been allocated specifically to the digital world and improving our lives digitally.

We’ve generated so much capital, so much wealth, and so many riches. What we’ve seen is that we’ve improved our online experience, but that’s about it. You go out and look around outside—where’s the infrastructure improvement? The United States is, like, 3x as rich as it was 2 decades ago in terms of GDP output. When you look at the infrastructure, has it really improved that much?

I think we’re heading back into that world. AI combined with robotics, combined with all the new dynamism funds that are coming out, is going to produce a radical change in the infrastructure in the United States. We’re going to see upgrades to the power grid.

I know this is silly, but things like Trump fixing D.C., in terms of just the fountains. If you go to the fountains in D.C., they’re no longer covered with algae. There’s this great park that I actually grew up down the street from called Meridian Hill Park, which was completely filled with drug addicts. There was this beautiful fountain modeled after Paris, and it was in total disrepair. It was totally green, and the water wasn’t flowing.

He comes in, totally fixes the whole thing, and makes it beautiful again. He’s doing the same thing with the reflecting pool. I think there’s demand for this. There’s demand for the beautification of spaces.

There's demand for better infrastructure. And I think with AI, with robotics, with all of the riches from the world of software, I think we're going to reallocate to the physical world.

And not only that, we're seeing demand for IRL events. I mean, with the collapse of engineering costs, I'm seeing companies dedicate a lot more money to marketing. And part of the marketing budget is actually IRL events. People are really craving this.

I mean, if you walk around New York, people are outside more than ever. Every single restaurant is completely packed. The reservation culture is out of control, which we can talk about on another pod, but IRL is going to come back in a big way.