In this FSD episode, titled The Kids Will Be All Right, Ram Ahluwalia records on a Thursday evening drive after a down day for the market and argues the setup is healthier than the mood. He walks through the classic bear market conditions, the 1970s stagflation, the 1987 crash, the egregious valuations of the dot com bust, and points out that none of them exist today. What exists instead is a wall of worry, with Michael Burry helping to build it, and a fun fact he cannot get over: valuations for AI linked names are cheaper now than they were in 2023. The real AI moment, he argues, was not ChatGPT but Claude Cowork, because it drives workflows and revenue, with Anthropic potentially reaching $80 billion in revenue this year.
From there he works through the evidence. Klarna scrapped its call centers and then rehired people to supervise the AI, biotech anecdotes hint at what is coming, and a $7,000 full body workup at NYU Langone now exists where it did not before. Geopolitics gets a quick dismissal: China's one person rule makes it fragile with no chain of succession, and Russia has spent a generation of young men. On markets, he flags the earnings season pattern where names report strong growth and still drop, and he is buying into it: more AppLovin, Riley Exploration at under five times forward earnings with oodles of free cash flow, and Cigna, a quality compounder with no Medicare Advantage exposure that is, at the very least, better than bonds. Snowflake gets a pass after a Capital One customer described building an internal stack to cancel it, with Capital One now selling a data lake to other banks.
The back half turns to names and news. Zillow, which he calls Kleenex for tissue paper, finally hit a price worth buying after dropping 17 points, his first ever purchase of the name. Microsoft makes more sense after its divorce from OpenAI. The day's pullback cleared out excess optimism, oil rallied on Strait of Hormuz doubts, and energy looks like an overweight with free cash flow yields running as high as 40 percent. As for the $100,000 Truth Social feed, just assume Trump tacos, he says, saving you a fee that Citadel and Millennium will happily pay. He closes with the Lumida Invest app's new near real time earnings feed.
(00:00) Intro: the kids will be all right
(00:30) The S&P 500 through every crisis
(01:35) Focus on earnings, not the past
(02:10) The bear market checklist
(02:46) AI valuations cheaper than 2023
(03:45) Claude Cowork was the real AI moment
(05:16) Where AI adoption stands
(05:50) Klarna and the call centers
(06:46) The $7,000 full body workup
(07:30) China and Russia are fragile
(08:38) The earnings season pattern
(09:24) AppLovin and Riley Exploration
(10:26) Asking Grok who reported today
(11:14) Capital One cancelled Snowflake
(12:23) Lumida Invest app update
(12:54) Cigna is better than bonds
(14:11) Charter and the bear case debate
(15:14) Zillow is Kleenex
(16:30) Microsoft and the pullback
(17:22) Headlines: Hormuz, tariffs, oil
(17:59) Energy overweight and Trump tacos
(19:07) Wrap up
About the show: Non-Consensus Investing is Ram Ahluwalia's runhere he shares how he's actually positioning capital and talksthrough the ideas most investors are missing. Real-time analysis, specific names, and a bias toward what's overlooked rather than what's crowded.