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The Reformed Millennials Podcast covers a wide ranging topic arc focusing on Sports and Investing. RM Pod is dedicated to identifying the latest trends in technology, sport and investing. We discuss the ways Millennials can leverage these trends to better invest their time, fandom and money. reformedmillennials.substack.com

  1. Jun 29

    Nobody’s Eating their Humble Pie

    Two weeks ago I sat in this chair and told you to stop arguing about whether AI is a bubble and watch two things instead: the bond market, and the war in the Middle East. We got our answer for both. So let’s grade the tape - starting with the one that should humble every expert who opened their mouth this spring, including me. The humble pie nobody’s eating For four months we had a shooting war with Iran. For 90% of it, the Strait of Hormuz was effectively closed. A fifth of the world’s oil moves through that strait, and in the eyes of basically every energy analyst alive it’s the single most important piece of infrastructure in the global economy… And every single person in the energy market had the identical opinion. Oil’s going to a hundred and twenty, maybe a hundred and fifty. Inflation shocks everything. Batten down the hatches, the Nasdaq sells off twenty-five percent. It was unanimous. None of it happened. This past week tankers started transiting the strait again, Iran is winding down the closure, they’ve signed onto a memorandum of understanding — and instead of oil staying high, it collapsed back to roughly five to seven percent above where it sat before the first missile flew. WTI is down in the seventies. After all of that. A war, a closed chokepoint, a quarter of the year with twenty-plus percent of global energy trade taken offline — and crude is basically flat on the year. Nobody is doing the postmortem. Nobody is eating the pie. So let me eat mine, because being wrong in public is the only honest way to get better. I was sure energy stayed higher for longer. I was wrong. Why? Three reasons: One — China drew down its own inventories instead of panic-buying. They had far more in reserve than anyone modeled, which tells you how little we actually know about how other countries operate. Two — China could flex its demand down. Their build-out of EVs, electrified transit, and solar has quietly made oil far more elastic than the textbooks assume; the idea that price has to stay high for long is now genuinely in question. Three — dark transits. There is a whole shadow logistics system moving barrels outside the view of the people who price this stuff, and it’s bigger than anyone admits. Put those three together and you have the only real explanation for why every commentator got it wrong. The part that matters for your portfolio: a meaningful chunk of that Chinese demand reduction in transport is going to be permanent. That’s not a wartime blip you get back. That’s a structural dent in the long oil story. Separate Alberta’s very real cyclical windfall from the secular demand picture — they are not the same trade. Warsh changing the feds math while everyone watched the war Kevin Warsh ran his first meeting as Fed chair, and he is a more hawkish animal than Powell — which is gloriously ironic, because he’s exactly who Trump pushed for. Two things came out of that meeting. First, he told the market he doesn’t love dot plots and isn’t going to telegraph the next three moves. Markets hate uncertainty, and they let him know it. Second, and bigger: he made clear he’s not cutting this year. The market repriced instantly — from pricing a possible December cut to roughly two-thirds odds of a rate hike in September. That is a massive move in the discount rate sitting under every equity attached to the USD. That happened Thursday. Everyone went on vacation. We came back to two red days, the Nasdaq and S&P each down one to two percent, and a market that had been up ten, twelve, thirteen percent on the year handed back a third of it to sit around seven or eight. A Canadian wrinkle I can’t ignore. A Fed that’s cleared out 2026 cuts and is flirting with hikes bleeds straight into us. I was poking through realtor.ca data for fun, and inventory is climbing across the country — including here in Alberta, in Calgary and Edmonton, the fastest-growing part of the country. This housing market cannot handle rate increases. Ontario and BC certainly can’t. Which brings us to the thing that genuinely annoyed me this week. The condo bailout, and the courage we don’t have On June 18, Mark Carney and BC Premier David Eby cut a deal. There are thousands of finished condos in BC sitting empty — over two thousand units — as demand cooled with slower population growth, and the developers who built them are staring at insolvency. So Ottawa and the province are co-funding a package north of three billion dollars, roughly split between them, to buy those condos at their list prices and convert them into affordable housing. Mel’s take was sharp, and I think it’s the right starting point. Why are we intervening at all? When demand falls, price is supposed to fall with it. That’s the whole mechanism. Let the market clear these units at a lower number, and if government wants affordable housing, take the money and build it. Instead we’re rescuing a sector at list price. Her deeper point cut harder: this is preservation, not progress. An outsized share of Canada’s economy is real estate and everything stapled to it, the wealthy and the older cohort are heavily invested in keeping those values up, and protecting them is politically expedient. We have a brilliant economist running the country who surely understands supply and demand — but apparently those laws get suspended for the one golden-goose industry nobody wants to touch. She called it a failure of political courage, and the line that stuck with me: be the one who decides, or stop pretending you can’t. I pushed back, because I’m more sympathetic to the occasional bailout than she is, and here’s why. Force a fire sale and you don’t just punish wealthy developers — you wipe out the contractors, electricians, drywallers, and painters underneath them who only get paid if these projects get made whole. Let the majors fail and you send a signal that Canada isn’t investable, that cap rates need to double, and that contagion can run from condos into the entire commercial and industrial real estate complex. Central bankers — and Carney is still one at heart — look at this through 2008 and 2009 and refuse to risk a run. I understand that instinct. But Mel’s rebuttal landed. If we care this much about the jobs in this sector, why don’t we extend that same care to the natural resources workers we’ve ignored for a decade — workers who, conveniently, don’t swing ridings in the GTA and Vancouver? A central banker’s job is to read the room and pull the levers available. A leader’s job is to change the board. Carney is one of the few people on earth who could actually change the board, and he’s choosing to defend the old one. Europe 2031, and the choice in front of Canada Europe just moved to block US big tech — Microsoft, Amazon, the hyperscalers — from selling software into government agencies, a de facto rejection of American influence dressed up as driving homegrown innovation. And it’s framed perfectly by a piece making the rounds called Europe 2031. It’s a fiction story of two characters living out a a five-year scenario. Its written by serious EU AI-policy people as a warning. The setup: January 2025, DeepSeek’s R1 drops, Nvidia falls twenty-odd percent, memory names down thirty, photonics down forty to fifty, and Europe takes a victory lap — see, AI is solved and cheap, we don’t need America’s hundred-billion-dollar data centers, we’ll buy intelligence on the discount rack. Then the gap doesn’t close. It explodes. By the end of the story the US runs seventeen times Europe’s compute and hosts eighty percent of the world’s AI capacity, because Europe bet that compute was a commodity and that “sovereignty” would make it stronger. It made it weaker. The instinct to reject the technology became the cause of its irrelevance. The piece names Canada explicitly, and this is the part that scared me a little. It lists the middle powers who actually hold leverage, the ones sitting on real bottlenecks. The Netherlands has ASML, the only company on earth that builds the ~$350M EUV machines that print every advanced chip; no EUV, no GPU, no CPU, no memory. Germany has robotics. France and Norway have AI talent. The UK has finance. Japan controls the chemicals the whole data-center build-out depends on. South Korea has the memory - Hynix, Samsung, Micron’s footprint. And Canada has the energy, the critical minerals, world-class AI labs like Amii right here in Edmonton, and the geographic luck of sitting directly on top of the largest consumption engine on the planet. We do not have to become Europe. We could be something better — a blend of what makes the US and Europe each work. But the warning in the piece is that we share Europe’s exact disease: we’d rather study a hard problem to death than pour the concrete. The investment lesson is blunt: if you allocate capital into jurisdictions that reject progress on principle, your return on invested capital will be atrocious. Policy is not background noise. It’s the thing that decides whether you get ten-percent compounding or a low-growth trap. Mel framed the whole posture as a luxury belief - like the person who’s gone to the gym for ten years and decides they’re just naturally healthy, forgetting it was the daily reps. And right on cue: a hundred billion dollars of proof If you want evidence the gap in Europe 2031 is real and not science fiction, look at what dropped this weekend. The two leading American AI labs, OpenAI and Anthropic, now have combined annualized revenue north of $100 billion. Sit with that. The Anthropic line alone is the wildest chart in business right now: roughly $1 billion of ARR in January 2025 to about $30 billion by April 2026, when it passed OpenAI in revenue for the first time - and climbing into the high-forties since. OpenAI is doing about two billion dollars a month an

    57 min

  2. Jun 10

    Yields Break Out, the Biggest IPO in History, and Why "Hater" Isn't a Strategy

    For three years the only question anyone asked me was whether AI is a bubble. Is it real, who wins, what inning are we in. I’ve been saying inning three or four the whole time, and I’ll say it again. But it’s the wrong question, and last Friday’s tape is the reason why. Here’s the better one. Where is the money actually flowing inside all of this, and what happens to every high-flying name if the bond market becomes the story? The jobs report nobody wanted Last Friday the US printed a jobs report that was too good. Stronger hiring, plus upward revisions to the prior two months that pushed the three-month average to its highest since early 2024. Job openings reversed from shrinking to growing. That’s a hot economy. For two and a half years the market has priced one thing: rate cuts. Money was going to get cheaper. Friday said the opposite. When the cost of money goes up, the multiple you’ll pay for long-duration, high-beta, fast-money stuff comes down, and that’s exactly what AI momentum names are. The compensation you demand for risk has to rise with the risk-free rate. So the two-year Treasury broke out to a fresh twelve-month high, the ten-year sits at 4.57%, and stocks sold off hard. Down two and a half percent on Friday, with more bleeding into this week as we await todays inflation data. All of it is happening with a Fed in the middle of a leadership change, a President running a war in the Middle East, an inflation mandate he hasn’t delivered on, and a midterm cycle bearing down. That’s a lot of headwind in one frame. Sit with how stark the shift is. The market spent two years rewarding one kind of positioning, and the regime just flipped under everyone’s feet. There’s a Canadian wrinkle I can’t ignore. If the data stays hot and the Fed can’t cut, the Bank of Canada can’t comfortably cut either, and we are not in the same economic shape. The US is running hot. Europe is choking on input costs. Most of Canada outside the export-heavy West already looks like it’s in a recession. The exception is Alberta, where oil above eighty dollars has handed us the leverage we’ve wanted for a long time. I’ll be honest. As an Albertan, I haven’t had this much fun investing in eighteen months. That’s an uncomfortable thing to say when a lot of the country is hurting, but it’s true, and that divergence is going to define the next year. The math says don’t buy stocks. The history says buy the right ones. Now look under the hood. The ten-year yields 4.57%. The S&P’s earnings yield is 4.56%. Those are the same number. On the classic risk-adjusted math, why would you own stocks at all? You’re not being paid to. This is where everyone needs to understand one piece of research, because it reframes the whole thing. Hendrik Bessembinder studied 64,000 global stocks over thirty years, a window that includes the dot-com bust, the financial crisis, and four recessions. Every bad thing that’s happened in my lifetime is in the data. What he found is that one to two percent of stocks generated all the net wealth created above Treasury bills. The other 98 or 99 percent, added together, netted out to roughly the return on T-bills. Somewhere between 55 and 57 percent of stocks actually underperformed T-bills over three decades. Bring that down to the S&P 500 and the point gets sharp. Out of five hundred names, maybe ten or twelve do the real work. If you don’t own them, you didn’t just lag. You got wrecked for all the risk you took. And the cruel part is those names are usually the controversial, hard-to-hold ones. The last few years it was easy. Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Tesla, Walmart. The next thirty years won’t be the same companies. But I’d bet my house the shape is identical. One or two percent of the names deliver the entire prize. If you won’t invest into where the paradigm is going, you miss it. Full stop. The IPO supercycle, and the lie about it draining the market And the paradigm is going public. Over the next six to nine months we get Anthropic, OpenAI, Anduril, and Stripe, the biggest private payment processor on earth. SpaceX prices this week. Google just raised eighty billion in equity anchored by Berkshire. The greatest entrepreneurs of the last fifteen years are all reaching for liquidity at once. So much for “sell in May and go away.” The people who make their living raising capital can’t go anywhere this summer. The question every client asks me: won’t all these IPOs suck the money out of the market and trigger a correction? It’s the intuitive fear, and it’s wrong. Here’s why. The largest pools of capital on the planet, the Fidelitys and T. Rowe Prices and Manulifes and Sun Lifes, mostly have no mandate to own private companies. Where they can, it’s capped around 15 percent. They were locked out of Anthropic, locked out of SpaceX, locked out of the best compounders of the decade. Once these names are public, those funds have to allocate. That’s where the bid comes from. The global equity market is north of a hundred trillion dollars. It can absorb four hundred billion in new equity without blinking. If there’s a problem, it’s a short one. Think about what that liquidity does on the other side. Ask which Canadian city has minted the most millionaires recently and the answer is Ottawa, because of Shopify. The stock went from a sub-billion valuation to the second most valuable company in the country and turned a generation of early employees and investors into a tech hub’s worth of capital. Now run that forward across the zip codes where SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Anduril live. That’s the American flywheel. Liquidity creates wealth, wealth funds the next wave of founders, and the cycle compounds. SpaceX: the $1.8 trillion magic trick Which brings me to SpaceX, where I’ll disclose up front that my firm, RBC, is one of the underwriters. They’re raising roughly $75 billion at a $1.77 trillion valuation, $135 a share, listing on the Nasdaq this week under SPCX. That raise is triple the size of Alibaba, the previous record. It’s the largest IPO in history, and it came in double-subscribed. Finding the capital was never the problem. Is $1.8 trillion outrageous? Of course. But read the prospectus and it gets funny. SpaceX claims a $28.5 trillion total addressable market, the largest TAM in human history. And that number is the whole tell about how Musk works. There are three businesses stapled into one ticker. Rockets, Starlink connectivity, and xAI-plus-X, and yes, X is Twitter. The Twitter business is a dumpster fire. xAI, for all practical purposes, is a dumpster fire. Before Musk merged them in about six months ago, the core was profitable. Fold xAI and X back in and you get a negative-cash-flow company posting a $4.9 billion loss on $18.7 billion of revenue. So why do it? Because rockets and Starlink are only about six to ten percent of that headline TAM. The other ninety-plus percent is “AI,” and the valuation of AI right now is, conveniently, infinity. Here’s the part where I’ve changed my mind on the man more than once. Musk’s actual superpower isn’t engineering. It’s that he never forgets his first job as a steward of capital is to make his investors money. He bought Twitter for $25 billion when Biden’s regime more or less forced his hand, pulled his closest friends in to fund it, and three years later that albatross gets merged into the hottest IPO ever. His backers get their liquidity through SpaceX. Along the way he built Colossus, the biggest data-center and chip-manufacturing project in the US, and used it to expand his story from a $2 trillion space-and-connectivity TAM to $28.5 trillion. That’s not signaling. That’s the discipline of putting returns first, and he’s the best in the world at it. Mel’s frame on this is the one I want people to sit with. For fifteen years a chunk of society convinced itself that if we just clicked our heels and thought about capitalism differently, we could rewrite the rules. We can’t. The person who makes the gold makes the rules, and the rules of free markets outlast whatever Overton window the politics of the moment is trying to drag around. Being a hater is not an investment strategy. The cleanest proof is Ontario Teachers’. In 2019 the pension put $300 million into SpaceX. That stake is now worth about $16 billion, call it a 5,200% return in seven years. That single gain is more than half the size of Alberta’s entire Heritage Savings Trust Fund. And the point of it isn’t to make anyone rich. It’s to fund stable, defined-benefit pensions for hundreds of thousands of Ontario teachers for decades. Meanwhile the Premier of that same province, Doug Ford, canceled a Starlink contract on principle. Intention and impact are not the same thing. When fiduciary duty gets hijacked by vibes, the people who lose are the teachers and nurses on the other end of the cheque. Have your politics. Vote your conscience. Just don’t confuse a boycott with a strategy. Canada’s AI “strategy,” and the data-center problem nobody wants to name About ten days ago Carney’s government tabled its national AI plan, “AI for All.” Six pillars running from protecting democracy to scaling Canadian champions to building global partnerships, wrapped around a $2 billion sovereign-compute commitment and headline promises of $200 billion in GDP and 250,000 jobs. The pillars are fine. They’re all good things to want. The number is so small relative to the ambition that it reads as a signal more than a strategy, and Mel’s take is the right one. You can’t take a press release to the bank. This is a government with a track record of announcing important things and not executing them at the speed business actually moves. And here’s the line that matters. You do not have an AI strategy if you don’t have a data-center strategy. No data centers means no c

    47 min

  3. May 31

    Data Centers Are the New Pipelines

    Welcome Back. Three meetings shaped the last two weeks. Each one looks like a different story. Each one is actually the same story. The first was Donald Trump inside the Zhongnanhai - the inner compound of the Chinese leadership. Only three other sitting U.S. presidents have ever been invited in. The second was Mark Carney and Danielle Smith shaking hands on the West Coast pipeline framework, with an October 1 target to designate it a project of national significance and a stated goal of 8 million barrels a day of export capacity by 2030. The third didn’t happen in any one room - it happened in courthouses across Texas, Florida, Oklahoma, Ohio, and Alberta, where county after county is now ruling against the build-out of AI data centers. That third story is the one most people are missing. Data centers are unquestionably the most politically cancerous infrastructure that has ever been positioned in the history of North America. 73% of voters — left and right, U.S. and Canada — do not want them in their backyard. The AI capex cycle has become, almost overnight, the most hated topic in domestic politics. And that creates a problem the hyperscalers do not know how to solve. It also creates an opportunity for the one jurisdiction on this continent that has spent forty years figuring out how to build hated-but-necessary infrastructure: Alberta. I’m not calling a market top. I want to be clear about that. This is not a 2000 or 2007 setup. But the character of the market is changing. Long rates are breaking out in the U.S. and in Canada, Powell is out and the new Fed chair was sworn in last week, energy is leading, AI names are ripping (Micron just touched a trillion in market cap), and we are about to absorb four of the largest IPOs in human history. Cerebras already priced at $150B. The stock traded to $350 before selling off to the $270s. SpaceX is filing at $1.75T-$2.0T. That single IPO is roughly 75–80% of the entire market cap of the TSX. When that much private money gets vacuumed into a few mega-listings, it pulls capital out of every other corner of the market to find price. Expect volatility through the summer. Where Mel Sharpened It Mel pushed back on a few of my reads in ways that mattered. On the Trump–Xi summit: my instinct was to read Trump’s deferential posture as a tactical concession. Mel reframed it through a Foreign Affairs lens - what she called the new G2 world. It is not a Cold War redux of mutually-assured destruction. It is a mutual recognition that neither the U.S. nor China is going to displace the other, and that the two powers are now finding ways to use each other inside defined domains rather than trying to win. That distinction matters for Canadian foreign policy. If the U.S. is comfortable with a working G2, the question of how Carney’s posture on China (EVs, canola, capital flows) will be received in Washington is suddenly more open than it looked six months ago. She also pushed me on a question I underweight: where is the line between Trump the person and Trump the president? With most leaders that distinction is invisible. With this one it is unusually visible — and getting that read right is what separates analysts who take him literally but not seriously from analysts who do the opposite. The most useful frame Mel offered was on the data-center backlash itself. She introduced Maslow’s hierarchy as the right lens. We make the mistake of treating policy choices as binary… yes/no on the ballot, when they are actually continuums of trade-offs. Canadians have had the luxury of not having to make those trade-offs ourselves, which has produced a generation of luxury beliefs about energy that don’t survive contact with the actual physics of running a modern economy. Caring more about the environment than economics is a position you can only afford when someone else is producing the energy you’re using. The Macro Read: AI’s New Constraint Is Permission, Not Compute For two years the binding constraint on the AI cycle has been compute and power. That is changing fast. Gavin Baker had the cleanest line on it: TSMC could produce $2 trillion in chips this year if they didn’t care about the longevity of their business. There is that much demand. Instead they will produce about 20% of that — roughly $400B — because they are pacing themselves. The chip side of the constraint is being managed by one disciplined Taiwanese foundry. The newer constraint is permission. Data centers need cool climate, cheap power, abundant land, and a community that will actually let them build. The hyperscalers spent two decades building wherever they wanted because latency didn’t matter much and the physical footprint was small. That world is gone. Latency now matters. Bandwidth now matters. Megawatts per square foot has gone vertical. So the build-out is colliding with NIMBY politics in every county in North America right as the cycle needs to accelerate. We would have a bubble if we could actually get the infrastructure built. We can’t. We have a governor on this runaway wagon, and it is the most healthy thing that could possibly happen to this cycle. The CEOs running the leading AI labs are not equipped for this fight. Dario Amodei keeps telling everyone the world is going to end and that only he can save it. Sam Altman is, charitably, not lovable. Elon Musk is the most polarizing human being on earth outside of Trump. Alex Karp can’t sit still in a chair. These are not people who win school-board fights in Lubbock or Strathcona County. The AI CEOs of the leading labs have all failed at the political game. It’s over. Game over. They need to find a new path forward. That path forward is going to be checks in mailboxes. A municipality is not going to be moved by a one-time $50M payment to a county budget. It will be moved by a $10,000 annual check to 14,000 households for 20 years. That is the math the hyperscalers are about to learn. Which brings us to Alberta. The Policy Read: Alberta Is the Most Investable Place on the Continent Alberta is uniquely positioned for this opportunity for reasons that compound on each other. Northern, cool climate. Cheap energy. Stranded molecules that can be moved behind-the-meter into power generation rather than flared. The only deregulated electricity market in Canada, which means private generators can build and sign power purchase agreements directly with data-center operators - something you cannot do in a system where the government owns the generation. We have engineering talent that knows how to build large, complex, hated infrastructure on time and on budget. We have been doing this for forty years. The data-center boom is the same political problem as the pipeline - and we are the only province that has spent a generation getting good at solving it. On the MOU itself, Mel did the heavy lifting again: * The Carney–Smith agreement on the industrial carbon price gave industry clarity but not competitiveness. Those are two different things. Clarity is necessary. It is not sufficient. * Brownfield projects will be fine. The economics of greenfield investment - new pipelines, new facilities, the marginal barrel - are still not competitive with comparable jurisdictions elsewhere in the world. * The pipeline is contingent on Pathways. Pathways is contingent on the pipeline. Someone has to move first. * Alberta will submit its proposal to the Major Projects Office on July 1. Designation as a project of national significance is targeted for October 1. Separation referendum is October 19. If you’re the federal government, and you are about to designate a project of national significance two and a half weeks before a separation referendum, you are going to ensure that project is still inside our nation when the dust settles. Mel was unambiguous on the referendum. She is a federalist. She is voting to stay. And her argument — which I agree with — is that separation does not solve the infrastructure problem. It almost certainly makes it worse. If your primary reason for wanting to separate is that you can’t get a pipeline built, leaving Canada does not get the pipeline built. The path forward is to use the leverage we have inside the federation. Her closing line was the cleanest framing of the whole episode, and it’s the one I keep coming back to: Alberta is not in a parent–child relationship with Ottawa. If we stomp our feet and don’t get what we want, we become the actors the rest of the country accuses us of being. This is good for Alberta. This is good for Canada. It should be done on merit. - Mel What I’m Watching * The IPO calendar. SpaceX filing at $1.75T is the largest IPO in history. Expect a capital vacuum that pulls money out of mid-caps and small-caps across the index. Use the volatility to add, don’t chase. * Long rates. The 30-year is breaking out in both the U.S. and Canada. New Fed chair just sworn in. The bond market is the variable that resolves the next regime. * Alberta data-center build. Watch for the first behind-the-meter announcement from a hyperscaler in Grande Prairie, Edmonton, or Calgary. That is the leading indicator of the regional capex cycle turning on. * MOU sequencing. July 1 (Alberta submits to MPO) → October 1 (designation target) → October 19 (separation referendum). These three dates compress an enormous amount of political capital into a 16-week window. * AI infrastructure earnings. Stay long the picks-and-shovels - memory, power semis, optical/photonics, transformers. Sell-side estimates still drag the real demand curve. Podcast & YouTube Recommendations🎙 * Dan Loeb - ILTB * Meb Faber and Tom Lee Talk Macro * A Beautiful Tribecca Apartment This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit reformedmillennials.substack.com

    58 min

  4. May 13

    "I Don't Use AI" Is the New "I Don't Use Computers"

    Every twenty or thirty years a new general-purpose technology shows up and quietly rewrites the entire economic order. Steam. Electricity. The PC. The internet. Mobile. Every single time, the same pattern plays out. One group adopts early and compounds. Another group waits, calls it a fad, tells themselves their experience makes them immune. By the time the second group looks up from their chosen ignorance, the gap is already too wide to close. We are sitting inside that window right now. Most people can’t see it. The line I keep coming back to, and the title of today’s show, is this: “I don’t use AI” is the new “I don’t use computers.” In every previous shift, you had a decade or four to catch up. With AI, the gap between early and late adopters is closer to eighteen months. The moat you spent twenty years building gets crossed in a year and a half if you stop defending it. Mel pushed me on this on the show. Her question: “is it really that people don’t want to adopt, or is it that they don’t feel they can?” is the right one. The honest answer is: it’s intimidating, it’s expensive at the leading edge ($30–$250/month per seat, and tens of millions a year if you’re plugging models into an enterprise), and most people don’t yet have a good mental model for what these tools actually do. But the cost of not engaging is now structural. AI is a motorcycle for the mind in the same way the personal computer was a bicycle. Output expectations are going up everywhere, quality, speed, polish, and the people sitting on the sidelines aren’t holding still. They’re falling behind a curve that is accelerating. If you take the stance “AI isn’t for me” and frame it as a values statement - that’s actually a career strategy. And it’s a bad one. The Bull Market Nobody Believes In The S&P 500, the Nasdaq, the Dow, the TSX, even Chinese equities (the CSI 300 just printed a fresh four-year high) are all hitting new highs at the same time. Most people don’t realize that. Most people are still telling you it’s a bubble. Real bubbles are built on euphoria. Right now, AAII bearishness has run hot for ten of the last eleven weeks. Consumer sentiment is near all-time lows. Half of American and Canadian adults think now is a bad time to invest. That’s not mania. That sounds like disbelief to me... George Soros’s framing is the one I keep returning to: when he saw a bubble forming, he ran in to buy it. Reflexivity. Bubbles are powerful trends, and being short them is one of the most expensive seats in the market. Even if this were a bubble (it isn’t), the data says you’d want to own more, not less. The two truths that can be true at the same time are these: A technology can be revolutionary. The equities tied to it can still go to zero. Both. Together. Always both. Cisco at the March 2000 peak: 201× P/E, $555B market cap, briefly the largest company in the world. Revenue kept growing for years afterward. The stock did not. Today’s setup is genuinely different. Top 10 names are ~40% of the S&P (vs. ~27% at the dot-com peak), but the multiple premium is narrower — 31× for the top 10 vs. 21× for the rest, vs. 43× / 21× in 2000. Multiples less extreme. Concentration more extreme. Different mix, same family of risk. The other thing that’s different: the data centers are lit up. In 1999 the fiber was dark and the rail cars were empty. Today the hyperscalers cannot buy enough capacity. The picks-and-shovels names are sold out into 2027. Power semis broke a five-year base. Memory pricing is up ~90% in a single quarter. Payback periods on these builds are now under three years. This is not a bubble looking for a pin. This is a real capital cycle, and we’re closer to the middle of it than the end. The risk is not that the music stops. The risk is that you capitulate, either out of the trade because you’re tired of being right, or into the trade at the top because the FOMO finally gets you. That’s the Druckenmiller story in 2000: shorted internet, took the loss, covered with discipline, then bought $6B of tech hours from the absolute top because his juniors were printing 3% a day and the social pressure of underperforming his own kids was unbearable. Six weeks later he was down $3B. His own line, years later: “I didn’t learn anything. I already knew I wasn’t supposed to do that.” The most dangerous moment in a bubble is when staying disciplined feels stupid. The Alberta Trade — A Once-in-a-Generation Setup The other big thread from our podcast on monday was Alberta. Mel did the heavy lifting walking through what’s actually happening with Carney, Premier Smith, the November 2025 MOU, the Major Projects Office, and the Pathways CCUS condition. Here’s the punchline you should walk away with: The math has changed. U.S. shale plateaued in November 2025. The UAE has fractured away from OPEC+. There is a structural global inventory deficit of ~1.5 billion barrels. Energy demand isn’t plateauing the way the IEA and the EIA modeled… Why? Data centers have rewritten the demand curve. We’re heading higher: 150, 160, possibly 200 million barrels a day on the long-run forecast. Canada has, in spades, exactly what the world is going to need: hydrocarbons, LNG, hydro, uranium, critical minerals, and the geographic position to deliver them. The Western Hemisphere is structurally long this regime. The thing standing in the way is policy clarity. As Mel walked through, you have three concentric circles that all need to overlap: * federal government, * provincial government, and * industry. Industry will pull the trigger on egress west the moment they can underwrite a 25% return on invested capital. They have no obligation to drill more for national security reasons — that is not their job, and it doesn’t happen anywhere else in the world. Where I disagree slightly with Mel, and where she pushed back on me, is on who has more political risk in this negotiation. My read was Smith. Mel’s read was Carney. She’s right. Smith wins politically either way: if Carney blocks the pipeline, that’s a generational gift to a Conservative provincial government heading into the polls. Carney is the one who has to spend political capital and depart from prevailing Laurentian orthodoxy. He has the upside and the downside. If Carney is serious about economic independence from the United States, which is the entire framing of the elbows-up project, there is a literal silver-bullet sitting in front of him. We just have to build. Energy companies pay twice — corporate taxes and royalties. Bitumen royalties alone were ~$17B on a $60–70B Alberta budget in ‘24–’25. That’s more than RBC, CIBC, Scotiabank, and Manulife pay in taxes combined. That’s the money that pays for hospitals, social services, education, housing. If we want better health care, more teachers, and more infrastructure, we need to sell more of what we do best. End of story. Podcast & YouTube Recommendations🎙 * Eric Nuttal talks about 200$ Oil * The economics and math behind operating and building LLMs * Buffett Breaks His Silence This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit reformedmillennials.substack.com

    57 min

  5. Apr 30

    Carney's $25B Bet, Ai Culture, and the Future of Canada’s Relationship With the USA

    By 2027, Bernie Sanders and his cabal of pessimists are going to be in the streets protesting AI. Blaming it for everything… That's the political tape we're walking into. The reason isn't ideology. It's economics. We are watching the most consequential technology transition since the industrial revolution play out in real time, and the early returns look exactly like the early returns of the last one: capital is winning, productivity is exploding, and the wages of the people doing the displaced work are flat to down. The week the catalysts all printed in one direction Before we get to the politics, let’s grade the tape, because the tape is what makes the rest of the argument unavoidable. TSMC’s Q1 2026 call was the cleanest piece of corporate communication I’ve read this quarter. They raised full-year 2026 revenue guidance to better than 30% year-over-year. Gross margin printed a new high of 66.2% — well above the 56%+ long-term guide. Capex is now tracking the high end of the $52–56 billion range, and management said explicitly that revenue growth will outpace capex growth. That’s a margin-expansion story sitting on top of a unit-volume story. They almost never travel together. They are travelling together right now. ASML revised 2026 revenue up to €36–40 billion (from €34–39 billion) and flagged an EUV supply shortage in 2027. Anthropic’s annualized revenue went from over $9 billion at the end of 2025 to over $30 billion by April 2026. That’s a tripling of ARR in three months. I have spent enough time around early-stage capex cycles to know what they look like, and that is what they look like. The single most important sentence said on a corporate call this quarter came from TSMC CEO C.C. Wei. I’m going to put it here in full because if you only remember one thing from this newsletter, it should be this: “The shift from generative AI and the query mode to agentic AI and command and action mode is leading to another step-up in the amount of tokens being consumed.” Read it twice. Generative AI was a query layer — a person typing a prompt and reading an answer. Agentic AI is a labor layer — a system doing the work end-to-end. The token math compounds, it doesn’t add. And the entity that consumes those tokens isn’t a curious knowledge worker on a free tier. It’s the workflow that used to belong to that worker. The mix shift inside TSMC tells the same story without the press release language. In the fourth quarter of 2019, high-performance computing was 29% of TSMC’s revenue and smartphones were 53%. Today HPC is 61% and smartphones are 26%. The positions have completely flipped in five years. Advanced nodes — 7nm or below, where TSMC is a de facto monopoly — are now roughly three-quarters of revenue. I keep coming back to this: 2026 revenue estimates for TSMC are up roughly 25% since September 2025, and the stock is up roughly 60% over that window. That’s a multiple holding while estimates run up. That is the signature of the market pricing more upside, not less. The bubble signal would be one of MSFT, GOOG, META, or AMZN guiding capex down on this week’s prints. UPDATE; All 4 hyperscalers beat and guided up last night. The Canadian canary nobody is talking about If you want a concrete data point that this is no longer a Silicon Valley story, look at Rogers. Last week Rogers Communications cut its 2026 capex plan by roughly 30%, from up-to-$3.5 billion down to $2.5–2.7 billion, and offered voluntary departure packages to about 10,000 employees. That is not a hyperscaler. That is a regulated Canadian incumbent. If a slow-growth telecom is willing to take a 30% capex axe and put 10,000 buyout offers on the table, the cultural permission to use AI to compress headcount is no longer a coastal phenomenon. It’s a TSX-60 phenomenon. The signal isn’t Rogers specifically. The signal is the speed of cultural adoption. Six months ago, a Canadian incumbent doing this would be a one-off. Today it reads as a template. I am watching BCE and Telus closely for the next two prints, and I am watching the Big Six banks even more closely. The first big bank to publicly acknowledge it is the one to own as a stock and to fear as an employee. What I think happens next I want to be clear that I am not a doomer. I am see justification in the AI capex thesis, and can already see the productivity gains that come with it. The world ends up richer on the other side of this. That has been true of every previous technology transition, and there is no reason to think it won’t be true here. But the transition is the part that’s going to be politically and culturally disorienting. Productivity gains and wage compression can — and during Engels’ Pause, did — coexist for decades. The political response to “the country is much richer in aggregate but my paycheck is flat and my kid can’t get an entry-level analyst job” is not going to be measured. It is going to be Bernie Sanders in the streets, and it is going to be sooner than people think. The 2027 timing isn’t a guess pulled out of the air. It’s the lag I’d expect between visible displacement and the political reaction to it. Productivity is already ticking up. Layoff announcements are already climbing. E ntry-level wage growth has already stalled. That is the smoke. The fire is the next two years. The picks-and-shovels remains the story. The foundation models are accelerating and monetizing. The AI-power complements are becoming more cemented, because the agentic layer is, at the end of the day, an electricity load. And budget for political volatility - because in a world where capital is winning this hard, this fast, the politics catch up. They always do. Podcast & YouTube Recommendations🎙 * Dwarkesh and Reiner Pope Teach Us Ai: * Kill Them With Kindness: Best Links of The Week🔮 * Labour productivity in non-conventional oil extraction is nearly $580 per hour; approximately ten times the rest of the economy Trevor Tombe, University of Calgary * According to a December 2025 C.D. Howe Institute study, just ONE natural resources project has been approved under the new federal Impact Assessment Act * saw this new interview with Ben Uyeda on About Art. Ben is an architect-turned multidisciplinary maker/artist/hotelier. He created Reset Hotel, where we stayed in Joshua Tree recently, and I got to spend a little time with him while we were there. A quote really stood out to me: “The difference between creativity and taste. The culture we’re in right now is mistaking having great taste for being creative. People are mistaking consumption with production, and I think creativity is always about production.“ It’s second nature for me to curate lots of great design ideas and products at this point. It’s what I constantly do online. It’s much, much harder, and probably much more valuable, to build great things. * Rogers Communications Inc. is offering voluntary departure packages to about 10,000 employees in its workforce as the telecom giant moves to cut costs amid slowing industry growth. - BNN * Engles Pause and Employment - Fabricated Knowledge This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit reformedmillennials.substack.com

    58 min

  6. Apr 1

    Hormuz Hostilities, Carney's Goals, and Canada’s Lost Decade

    Machiavelli, often considered the father of modern political philosophy, focused heavily on what he called the “effectual truth”—the reality of what actually works, rather than what we wish would happen in an ideal world. He believed that maintaining prosperity requires a clear-eyed understanding of power and a ruthless grasp of human nature. Right now, global markets, international security, and our own domestic economy are forcing us to take off the rose-colored glasses. Here is the effectual truth of what is driving the macro landscape this week. 1. The Geopolitical Contest of Economic Pain The Strait of Hormuz has been largely closed since late February, pushing WTI crude above $100 a barrel and U.S. gas to $4 a gallon. While the market surged this morning on hints of de-escalation, the broader strategic lesson is alarming. We are witnessing a shift away from conventional military deterrence toward a “contest of economic pain.” Adversaries are proving they do not need a world-class navy to inflict catastrophic damage on the West; they simply need the ability to choke off vital global commerce. This is the exact blueprint China is studying for Taiwan. The risk isn’t necessarily a D-Day style amphibious invasion, but a gray-zone “quarantine”—a customs dispute that forces the global economy to capitulate without a single shot fired. The West urgently needs a strategy of structured ambiguity and an acknowledgment of Economic Mutually Assured Destruction, because right now, we are entirely unprepared for the economic fallout of our own deterrence. 2. The AI Pivot: From Hardware to Agents In the markets, we’ve seen a violent rotation out of AI infrastructure names (like Micron, LITE, Coherent, and Ciena). This sell-off was triggered by Google’s new TurboQuant algorithm, which promises 6x memory compression. The debate tearing through the market right now is whether this massive leap in efficiency will kill hardware demand, or if it will trigger the “Jevons Paradox” - where increased efficiency actually drives wider adoption and consumption. While the hardware side re-rates, the software side is accelerating. AI “agents” are moving rapidly from pilots into live production. The true promise of tools like Claude is the automation of the “coordination tax” and the staggering amount of friction, documentation, and internal repackaging required to get anything done in a large organization. AI-native startups are going to move with terrifying speed, while massive incumbents will have to drag their workforce into the AI era. 3. Canada’s Stagnation: Falling Behind Alabama Bringing the focus back home, a jarring statistic has been dominating Canadian business circles: Canada’s GDP per capita has now fallen behind the state of Alabama. Over the last decade, our real GDP per capita grew by just 0.4% annually, dropping us below the OECD average for the first time in recorded history. How did we get here? * The Productivity Trap: A massive surge in temporary residents and cheap labor entirely disincentivized Canadian businesses from making the capital and technological investments necessary to improve productivity. * The Fiscal Mirage: Government spending has ballooned from 38% of GDP to 45% over the last decade. Because GDP includes government spending, this deficit-financed public sector expansion has masked a severe depression in the private sector. * The Brain Drain: The wealth gap at the top is driving our best talent away. Roughly 40% of Canada’s potential top 1% earners have emigrated to the U.S. seeking competitive compensation. But as investors, we navigate the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. My thoughts on the Iran conflict: Iran’s main suppliers are the same people facing untenable, existential risk from Hormuz being closed for an extended period. There are break points here where tens of millions or more die from starvation, cold, etc. Which people from all countries tend to be less than chill about. Yes, the US has global rivals who would like to “beat” American over time, but nobody is trying to have a destabilized Asian continent. *How* we have done what we just did (geopolitical equivalent to the Michael Jackson window baby approach to parenting) probably solidifies our handoff of the global mantle of leadership, which has profound long-term implications. But there is a very immediate “we absolutely cannot f*****g have this” situation on the ground for the exact players who allow Iran to exist. Hard to bear hug Iran while US and Israel are in “just kill everyone” mode. But whenever US and Israel are satisfied with the purge level, Iran will get bear hugged out of Hormuz. Or returned to the stone age courtesy of Huawei firmware. Hormuz being closed for Developed markets is a material threat to standards of living. For much of the world, it would be death on an unimaginable scale. The press has misframed the stakes. Governments (and more proximate markets) understand the actual risk profile here, which is why they’ve traded so weak vs US It’s going to take 5 to taco. None of which include Iran. Oil is down 1% with market up ~4%. Lots of work to do. Below you’ll find all the best stuff I have been reading and watching. Podcast & YouTube Recommendations🎙 * A Great episode that frames the current moment in markets from the Compound and DataTrek: * A great conversation about Taiwan and Iran: * Jamie Dimon talks about his legacy and the future of banking: * Zeihan on how to break Iran: Best Links of The Week🔮 * Ian Bremmer on the state of Iranian de-escalation - X * Josh Wolf talks about the alternative approaches to Ai - Thread on X * Getting on the right side of the ice. A great framming of software in today market. - Thread on X * A fantastic presentation on the future of SAAS from Redpoint. - Redpoint Partners * “Artificial intelligence drove chess toward perfect play, leading to more draws at top tournaments. Now grandmasters are winning by making less optimal moves... - Blomberg * “Whatever the final outcome for Anthropic from its feud with the Department of Defense, the attention it has generated — coupled with the company’s funny Super Bowl ads taking aim at OpenAI and the surging popularity of Claude Code — has made Anthropic more popular with consumers than ever. -TechCrunch This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit reformedmillennials.substack.com

    52 min

  7. Mar 18

    The Real Reason for the Iran War and The End of Freemium AI Chat Apps

    Welcome back to the pod, everyone. Todays episode covers the following 4 topics: * Canadian Jobs, Liberal majority and the Mark Carney performance review. * Market structure and positioning * War in Iran * Open Ai Shifts focus to the enterprise as LLMs prove they aren’t just a commodity. Market Update📈📉 Asset prices don’t make their biggest moves because of fundamentals. They move because of positioning. ] Right now, if you are reading the headlines, you are missing the underlying mechanics of what is actually happening in the market. We are looking at the first week of net outflows from equity ETFs since last April. But it’s not just selling. Volume in short ETFs just surged to new all-time highs. Participants aren’t just taking chips off the table; they are actively, aggressively betting against stocks at a historic pace. Add to that the fact that the VIX positioning has totally reset—the crowded trade of asset managers betting on lower volatility has been cleared out. A nd sitting right underneath all of this is the US Dollar Index, testing that massive, psychological 100 level. When positioning gets this one-sided, the risk completely shifts. It’s no longer about how much lower stocks can go. It’s about how catastrophically wrong these participants are going to be if prices start moving higher. If this market starts to go higher, all of those record shorts aren’t just wrong; they become fuel for a violent squeeze. But what lights the match? Political Tug of War: You have to look at the geopolitical chessboard, and specifically, you have to look past the mainstream narrative that the Middle East is just a “distraction.” There is a pervasive, intellectually lazy argument out there right now comparing America’s involvement in the Middle East to the decline of the British Empire. This idea that the USA is overextending itself in the “periphery” while China eats the future. It is a brilliant piece of reasoning, steeped in history, and it is completely, fundamentally wrong. Iran is not the periphery. Iran controls access to the Strait of Hormuz. It is at a nuclear breakout point, and it is the primary force multiplier for both Russia and China. A nuclear Iran is structurally a China-friendly Middle East, especially when China’s plans to price oil in yuan rely on those exact Gulf relations. So, when we see a targeted strike on Kharg Island, taking out military structures while leaving the oil infrastructure intact, that isn’t a distraction. That is a calculated play to force Iran to relent without sending oil to $200 a barrel and suffocating the global economy. It is a stark reminder that deterrence breaks the moment allies start doing the math on American passivity. Open Ai shifts to focus on the enterprise: This kind of forced reality check isn’t just happening in geopolitics; it’s happening in tech, too. Look at OpenAI. We are watching a massive strategy shift in real-time as they pivot away from consumer side-quests to focus strictly on the enterprise. Why? Because in a compute-constrained environment, hosting a billion free users is a financial black hole. Consumer habits are glacial, but enterprise customers will switch workflows overnight if the ROI makes sense. OpenAI is realizing they can’t fight a two-front war. If they don’t lock down the enterprise market against Anthropic, they lose their valuation premium. Meanwhile, incumbents like Alphabet and Meta are perfectly positioned to swallow the consumer AI market because they already have the infrastructure to monetize it through ads. AI is hitting its capital cycle reality phase. The easy money is gone, and the focus is shifting to who can actually generate cash flow. The crowd is leaning entirely to one side of the boat. Will it tip over? Podcast & YouTube Recommendations🎙 * Bill Gurley on the importance of personal agency: * Senra Interviews a human encyclopedia: Marc Andreessen * The most important conversation on the Ai Infrastructure landscape: Best Links of The Week🔮 * Thomasz Tunguz is concerned about memory and power shortages. * The emergence of Ai Agents inside the enterprise - Article from X * Fareed Zakaria makes the case for the USA becoming the next British Empire - Link from X * Jeff Currie from Goldman Sachs talks to the set up in Oil Markets - Link from X This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit reformedmillennials.substack.com

    51 min

  8. Mar 13

    Fog of War

    "The world has always been ending - and yet here we are." - Morgan HouselUS and Israeli strikes killed Iran's Supreme Leader. Oil spiked 40% in 10 days. The Strait of Hormuz - the chokepoint for roughly 20% of global oil supply - is in chaos. Flights grounded. Shipping rerouted. Headlines screaming.And the question I keep hearing is: "Should I be doing something?"Here's the only question we should be asking..."Did your financial goals, time horizon, or need for liquidity change this week?"If the answer is no... then neither should your portfolio.Korea. Vietnam. The Gulf War. 9/11. Iraq. Every one of those events felt like the one that would change everything. The reality is, it didn't change much for long-term investors.But here's what IS worth watching. Especially if you're Canadian:When the Middle East burns, capital doesn't disappear. It relocates.Upstream energy investment is already pivoting toward lower geopolitical risk - and that means North America. Canada, the US, and Guyana. Our oil sands don't sit on the wrong side of a naval chokepoint.Canadian energy names aren't just a hedge right now. For some portfolios, this conflict is quietly working in your favour.The sectors to watch: energy and consumer staples up. Airlines and chemicals under pressure. Technology remains a mixed picture: lower cyclical risk helps, but higher rates and data center financing costs are a real headwind.The investors who get hurt in moments like this aren't the ones who stayed put.They're the ones who confused scary headlines with permanent loss of capital and sold.Don't be that investor."I'm finished!" - Daniel Plainview Podcast & YouTube Recommendations🎙 * Tyler Cowan puts the entire world into perspective: * Hard lessons with Stan Druckenmiller: * A great view into the impacts of global shocks: Best Links of The Week🔮 * Matthew Ball’s annual report covers the state of the gaming industry, why gaming is losing the attention war, and the five areas of revenue growth for 2026. - Matts Amazing Year in Review * Jefferies published an update on the global secondary market, which broke volume records in 2025 ($240 billion). - Jefferies Report * Silicon Valley Bank’s published their 26th annual report on the State of the U.S. Wine Industry, which it says is stabilizing after revenue declined by 2% in 2025. -SVB Report * Ai causing cuts to software employment is just beginning - Tweet from Balaji * The shale revolution emboldened Trump. The shale revolution enabled this war. The shale revolution enabled the closure of the Hormuz Strait. - Tweet From Anas This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit reformedmillennials.substack.com

    50 min
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The Reformed Millennials Podcast covers a wide ranging topic arc focusing on Sports and Investing. RM Pod is dedicated to identifying the latest trends in technology, sport and investing. We discuss the ways Millennials can leverage these trends to better invest their time, fandom and money. reformedmillennials.substack.com

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