In this FSD episode, titled The Market for Compute Will Clear, Ram records on the drive home after a day of conversations in New York with a group of thoughtful VCs and a private credit investor who came up during the 2008 crisis. He opens on the AI infrastructure trade. CoreWeave rose 18% on the day and doubled its backlog, but the more important signal is the read-through for the rest of the industry: any compute that gets built will find a buyer. A100s manufactured years ago are still being sold, the NVIDIA financing consortium with Blackstone and other large private credit funds is set up to backstop and fund even more compute, and Anthropic's planned Q4 IPO reduces the counterparty risk that firms like Oracle carry, which is part of why Oracle traded up on the news.
From there he works through the semiconductor and memory names, many of them down 40% to 60% and, in his view, oversold. Memory is the complicated one, with new competition entering and NVIDIA leaning on photonics and system design to ease the demand for it. His pick of the day is Western Digital, a less crowded name than the memory leaders, with strong forward revenue growth, a valuation cheaper than the S&P 500, and direct exposure to the data center buildout. He trims a little energy as oil looks like it may have put in a local peak, but still likes energy on cheap valuations and steady demand, and he flags the political risk building around data centers heading into the midterms.
The back half moves away from markets. Ram talks about why relationships and community still matter as AI pushes people further into their phones, pointing to founder retreats, investment clubs, and community events that keep growing, and why he thinks higher education is overpriced and ripe for disruption even as the network it provides holds its value. He spends real time on health and longevity: using the Apple phone to aggregate medical records, leading his own care with advanced lipid and genetic testing, and the reminder that a longer life means planning a longer duration portfolio. He closes on tax, where he sees the same pattern he sees everywhere else. Most CPAs just file the return instead of mitigating, wealth management and tax prep sit near the top of the list of service businesses AI will disrupt, and Lumida is launching an AI tax calculator called Second Opinion by the end of the month.
(00:00) The conversations behind tonight's episode
(00:34) CoreWeave jumps 18%, and why compute will clear
(01:01) The NVIDIA financing consortium and
(01:22) Anthropic's Q4 IPO and Oracle's counterparty risk
(02:24) Semiconductors and memory, oversold
(03:30) Why we bought Western Digital
(05:03) Data center politics, the midterms,
(05:57) Relationships, networks, and community in the AI age
(09:08) Higher education is overpriced and
(10:36) Managing health and longevity with your phone
(11:38) Leading your own healthcare
(12:47) Genetics, ancestry, and the FOXO3 longevity gene
(14:45) Why longevity changes how you inves
(15:40) Tax mitigation and the case for Intuit
(16:44) Second Opinion and the service busi
About the show: Non-Consensus Investing is ntary on markets, where he shares how he'sactually positioning capital and talks through the ideas most investors are missing. Real-time analysis, specific names, and a bias toward what's overlooked