In this FSD episode, titled A Founder's Founder, Ram spends the first half on Travis Kalanick. After being pushed out of Uber, Travis went quiet for about six years and quietly built a set of businesses that now do around $450 million in revenue. One is a ghost-kitchen operation, and the core is what he calls the wheels business, essentially physical AI, robots with sensors. Uber is reportedly an investor, which Ram calls the ultimate validation when the firm you created cuts a check to back your next act.

Ram uses Travis to make a bigger point about where money is flowing. Venture is shifting from software to hardware, from bits to atoms, and he ties in names like Anduril, Shield AI, and SpaceX as part of that theme. He also explains why he rates Travis so highly. It is not the storytelling, it is the person: the tenacity, the chip on the shoulder, and the discipline to build for years without complaining. Ram is doing homework on Atoms, Travis's new deal, the same way he did before investing in Shield AI, and he asks viewers to share any research they have.

The back half turns to the market. Ram calls the day a junkie, animal-spirits rally and expects some chop ahead, but he still sees good names. He picked up AppLovin, which is growing revenue about 50% with strong earnings, and floats a theory that management talked the stock down to make their share grants more productive. He likes Riley Exploration in energy, a family-owned Permian name he compares to the show Landman, and a mispriced biopharma name he plans to cover in the newsletter. Software is working, with Atlassian jumping on the day, and he sees select opportunities in semis. On the question of Google losing senior engineering leaders, Ram is unbothered: the platform, the data, and the depth of talent are what matter, and he compares the worry to past scares that faded. He closes on Costco as a reminder that valuations matter, and a plug for the Lumida app, with real-time earnings transcripts landing Tuesday.

(00:00) Why today is about founders

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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

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.

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In this FSD episode, titled The Gestalt Shift, Ram Ahluwalia records on the Wednesday evening drive and builds the whole session around one idea: the gestalt shift, the moment the market suddenly rethinks what a company even is. He frames it the way you rethink a person after a scandal, then applies it to stocks. Nvidia's face melting numbers in May 2024 were the bullish version. Rivian and Lucid, the hottest names of 2021 that nobody talks about now, are the bearish version. The tell, he says, shows up in the tape: a beaten down name, a high volume day, price ripping higher with strength, and the same thing in reverse.

The heart of the episode is the AI and cloud re-rate that happened in a single week. Microsoft broke out the growth split that Google kept hidden, investors dug into the divorce with OpenAI over who keeps the IP, and three investment banks turned bullish on cloud at the same time, so what was non consensus became consensus almost overnight. From there he goes name by name. SpaceX, he argues, is quietly a data center company rather than a space company, a neo cloud, and he makes the provocative case that search is dead and OpenAI is going to eat the world. Google Spark is coming to Workspace as the first free personal AI assistant, and he thinks Google sits in pole position over Meta and Microsoft to win it.

The back half turns to positioning and risk. Using Apple's drop the day Steve Jobs's cancer was announced, he argues that one off, idiosyncratic news events are usually buying opportunities, and that the recent Google selloff over a few departures will not matter. He explains why he added to Google on its earnings dip, why AppLovin's 50% earnings growth has him wanting more, and why he would rather hold a couple dozen positions than a few concentrated bets, because diversification is the only free lunch. He closes on a genuinely non consensus call: Kevin Warsh's Fed nomination marked the top in gold, but with Japan intervening to prop up the yen, commodities are making a comeback, and he has been buying miners like Newmont and Albemarle.

(00:00) What a gestalt shift is (Weinstein, Nvidia)

About the show: Non-Consensus Investing is Ram Ahluwalia's running commentary on markets, where he shares how he's actually positioning capital and talks through the ideas most investors are missing. Real-time analysis, specific names, and a bias toward what's overlooked rather than what's crowded.

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In this FSD episode, titled The We're So Back Moment, Ram opens on the drive home with a story about running team performance reviews with Claude Code, giving it his Slack channels, his DMs, and his leadership framework so it could map each person against buckets like vision, standards, and pace. Then it's straight into the tape. Markets are overbought and staying overbought, Microsoft just landed on Goldman's conviction buy list, and Goldman, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America all came out the same day with the same message: cloud is back and the return on AI spend is real. Software, semis, and cloud rallying together is a melt-up condition, and with earnings growth this strong and valuations still reasonable, Ram thinks S&P 8,000 is a breeze.

He rewinds to what the smart money was saying a year ago. Howard Marks published Bubble Watch, Jeremy Grantham was doing what he does best as the most articulate bear in the world, GMO turned cautious, and Warren Buffett was raising cash and already out of Apple. The gray-haired money moment came and went, and now everyone who stepped aside has to get back in. A study of this exact setup found one historical match, March 2007, a correction followed by a stair-step rally. There is still value out there: he bought The Trade Desk back at 9.7 times forward earnings ahead of a political ad cycle he expects to reach 20 billion dollars, and Nvidia and TSM are still growing into reasonable multiples. The caveats are junk taking off, which usually precedes a cooling, and the September fade in midterm years.

The back half is the AI thesis and everything around it. Sentiment turned on a dime once Microsoft's CFO noted growth is coming from beyond the frontier labs, and Ram reframes the worry about OpenAI and Anthropic: they are not counterparty risk for the clouds, they are aggregators of end demand that Microsoft and Google would serve directly anyway. Financial services leads AI adoption yet the big banks are still in POC mode, which is why he sees an AI front-to-back bank as a bigger opportunity than Erebor's five billion dollar crypto bank raise, and why Lumida is building on the Lumida Invest app. Along the way: a peptides update (BPC-157 energy, DSIP for sleep), Trump's Jedi mind trick on Iran, Citadel's couple billion dollar week as a preview of return-on-time businesses, and the closing challenge for founders to move from AI productivity world to AI delegation world.

[00:00] Performance reviews with Claude Code

About the show: Non-Consensus Investing is Ram Ahluwalia's running commentary on markets, where he shares how he's actually positioning capital and talks through the ideas most investors are missing. Real-time analysis, specific names, and a bias toward what's overlooked rather than what's crowded.

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Michael Parekh, former lead internet analyst at Goldman Sachs, is back for a conversation that opens with one of the strangest stories of the cycle: Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness fund going from $45 billion at peak to a forced liquidation to Ken Griffin's Citadel, days before his wedding. Michael's read is an old one: always watch the leverage. The same dynamic hit South Korea, where over five million people took margin calls after piling into leveraged ETFs on Samsung and SK hynix.

From there, Ram and Michael work through earnings season. The big three clouds are guiding $620 billion of combined capex for 2026, and Microsoft's Amy Hood dropped the stat of the quarter: 90% of Azure's growth came from customers outside the frontier labs. They debate Gavin Baker's claim that Anthropic could be a $3 trillion company (Michael's range: one to three trillion, and you'll have to trade it), why Claude's compute shortage pushes developers toward Codex and Gemini, and why Michael sees Apple's Siri AI as the reason to treat a 50-year-old company like a startup. Ram, who put on an Apple short the week before, pushes back on valuation.

The back half covers Meta going cash-flow negative for the first time since its 2012 IPO, the "Ramageddon" memory shortage and whether China's CXMT changes the game, Nvidia backstopping OpenAI and rallying 40 US companies behind open source, and a reality check on humanoid robots: the data, components, and manufacturing base to build them at scale mostly don't exist outside China yet. Michael closes with Kipling. The short version: don't lose your head.

[00:00] Intro: what's changed since February

About the show: Non-Consensus Investing is the podcast from Lumida Wealth, hosted by Ram Ahluwalia. Each episode digs into where the crowd has it wrong across markets, technology, and macro, with guests who have skin in the game.

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In this FSD episode, titled One Comment Worth $500 Billion, Ram Ahluwalia starts with careers and talent: a friend leaving crypto for a pre revenue AI firm, and why it genuinely does not matter, because he is indexing his human capital to a transformational trend. The advice is to be intentional about geography and peer group. Go to SF for technology, Houston for energy, New York for finance, even without a job lined up. He remembers Harvard Business School classmates in 2006 who chose Goldman Sachs over Google because Goldman carried more prestige. They were solving for status, and the financial crisis arrived a year later.

The middle of the episode is the Leopold aftermath. There is the surreal image of a wedding whose invites went out at all time highs, with LPs as guests and a fund raise hanging awkwardly over the reception: no gifts please, but there is a new fund launching. Ram compares the blowup to the blue whale and Amaranth rather than Long Term Capital Management, and draws the structural lesson: in 1998 the New York Fed convened the investment banks, in 2008 it was Geithner and the bank CEOs, and today you call Citadel and Jane Street, who now act as lender and buyer of last resort. That sets up his thought experiment: maybe markets stop crashing, because every time the VIX hits 30, Citadel is there to buy the dip.

The back half turns constructive. Microsoft's CFO tucked one comment into the earnings call, that growth is coming from beyond the frontier labs, and Ram argues that single line was worth hundreds of billions of dollars, with $500 billion of market cap added in a day. He walks through the Oracle underwrite as a two by two matrix of OpenAI default risk against hyperscaler capex growth, notes that markets have gone overbought and stayed overbought, which is a new state of the world, and declares the buy the dip regime back after GoDaddy and Google both rallied off mispriced selloffs. Retail has washed out of semiconductors, the lever players have been carried out, and he sees gifts still on the table, like Taiwan Semiconductor at 18 times. He closes with the health corner: neti pots, the sleep first hierarchy, peptides, and why senior living care is one of the most obvious longevity trades.

(00:00) Intro

About the show: Non-Consensus Investing is Ram Ahluwalia's running commentary on markets, where he shares how he's actually positioning capital and talks through the ideas most investors are missing. Real-time analysis, specific names, and a bias toward what's overlooked rather than what's crowded.

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In this FSD episode, titled Microsoft Tacked On an Anthropic, Ram drives home through a heavy earnings week and starts with the read-throughs: Apple just needed the earnings event and Siri needs a rebrand, Amazon's cloud confirmed what Microsoft already showed, and Microsoft itself added $500 billion in market cap in a day, essentially tacking on an entire Anthropic. The detail he keeps coming back to is the Microsoft CFO's comment that 90% of the growth is coming from non frontier lab companies. That is enterprise demand, and in his words it is a gestalt shift that calls for an update on how you look at these names.

The middle of the drive works through the tape. Reddit fell 20% on strong numbers with no credible bear case, and the real question is whether it can get a slice of AI licensing while frontier lab budgets tighten. China reportedly got its hands on 20,000 Nvidia chips, and Ram argues the US is better off getting them hooked than cutting them off. Then the Leopold saga: the wedding, why being a hater is the wrong take, and why he is no Cathie Wood, since his fundamental thesis is correct even though he got way ahead of his skis. That rolls into a bigger claim, that Silicon Valley VCs are just not good at public markets, and a reality check on the physical AI pitch: GM has had physical AI for 15 years, and a modern harvest is one of the heights of Western civilization.

The back half is ideas. A genuinely non consensus one in Turkey, where 30% inflation has beaten down the market and the answer to "what's the JP Morgan of the country" is Turkcell, ticker TKC. Meta needs just one Anthropic or OpenAI contract to pop 10 to 15% in a day, though you can't growth hack your way into enterprise. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are each spending over $200 billion in CapEx next year, $800 billion with Meta in the mix, and the AI beneficiary layer still hasn't played out. He closes with the tax riff: a friend who skipped his estimated taxes on purpose, why every refund means you lent the government free money, the billions of CPA hours burned each year, and Al Goldstein's AI powered roll-up of CPA firms, before signing off for pizza night with the kids.

(00:00) Intro and this week's podcast preview

About the show: Non-Consensus Investing is Ram Ahluwalia's running commentary on markets, where he shares how he's actually positioning capital and talks through the ideas most investors are missing. Real-time analysis, specific names, and a bias toward what's overlooked rather than what's crowded.

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In this FSD episode, titled Ladies, Liquor and Leopold, Ram borrows Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger's old warning about ladies, liquor and leverage and maps it onto the market's main character: Leopold, the 24 year old Columbia valedictorian who just got married to the chief of staff of Anthropic and ran 4x leverage on a single concentrated AI bet. The lender of last resort always wins, and this time it was Citadel, picking up the positions at a discount and sitting on a couple billion dollars of gains already.

From there Ram walks through the history of bodies floating in the water at leverage driven bottoms: Archegos taking down Credit Suisse, and JP Morgan buying the legendary Bear Stearns for two dollars and getting the most sophisticated prime brokerage desk on the street with it. He points to the bigger trend underneath: where the Fed once convened the big investment banks in a crisis, today it is Citadel, Jane Street and Millennium doing the bidding. The lesson from the blow-up itself is about proximity. Leopold's thesis on AI capex demand was actually right, but he was too close to it, and surrounding yourself with people who share your thesis is a disadvantage. Buffett's edge is Omaha, far removed from the hype, and the same trap catches people who spend too much time with Michael Saylor or inside Silicon Valley.

The back half turns constructive. Markets sniff blood and sell in front of forced sellers, but with the main character out of the game, Ram sees a cleaner setup. Microsoft's numbers were very strong: 18 percent revenue growth, Azure up more than 40 percent, and the key takeaway that most of the growth is real enterprise demand rather than OpenAI or Anthropic, from an earnings transcript he says reads like walking through the Louvre. He closes with the bargains: NVIDIA in the 190 to 195 range, TSM at 18 times earnings, SK Hynix with the CEO buying shares, and the 1987 playbook, where the best time to buy stocks was a few weeks after the crash.

(00:00) Ladies, liquor and Leopold

About the show: Non-Consensus Investing is Ram Ahluwalia's running commentary on markets, where he shares how he's actually positioning capital and talks through the ideas most investors are missing. Real-time analysis, specific names, and a bias toward what's overlooked rather than what's crowded.

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In this FSD episode, titled Revenge of the Cloud Businesses, Ram records on the drive home from a Lumida investor dinner with a Citadel Securities leader, an early Anthropic investor, and a rates and commodities research head. The night's through line is that demand for AI compute is real and there is not enough of it. Microsoft just posted 18% year over year revenue growth with Azure up 43%, and Ram's take is that his personal distaste for Word, Excel, and the Microsoft 365 login is irrelevant: enterprise data, distribution, security, procurement advantages, and a free ride on OpenAI's IP are what matter, and Microsoft and Google will close the Copilot gap.

From there he gets concrete about the shortage. A large technology consumer at dinner said the latest NVIDIA systems simply cannot be rented, which matches Lumida's own experience: the backtest engine was designed around one specific Google instance, nicknamed the behemoth, with $60,000 of HBM memory attached, rented five minutes at a time, and it is never online. Meanwhile the memory trade is in the vomit phase, real capitulation, while quality names like ICE, CME Group, and Broadridge rally, and Ram frames it as a seesaw: quality has to stop rallying before semiconductors can rally. He also flags NVIDIA and TSM as the reasonably priced ends of the category, and notes Meta is spending heavily in a show me market that no longer pays for vision.

The back half turns to health and longevity, then the Fed. A longevity VC at dinner pointed out that GLP spending now exceeds the combined revenue of OpenAI and Anthropic, that wellness demand is inelastic, and that compounding pharmacies have no publicly traded pure play in the United States. Ram adds the case for building national brands in physical therapy, rehab, and senior living, plus community driven fitness like Lifetime and group sauna classes. On Fed day, Kevin Warsh talked hawkish without raising rates, and Ram weighs the forward guidance debate: he likes the theory that the Fed can't help but give guidance, remembers the early 2010s era of secondhand tea leaf reading that felt like a Reg FD violation, and lands on the punchline that without guidance, Citadel just hires Ben Bernanke. He closes with defense stocks, classic business models working again, and a detour into Song Exploder and his high school classmates who went on to make music history.

(00:00) Wrapping up the Lumida investor dinner

About the show: Non-Consensus Investing is Ram Ahluwalia's running commentary on markets, where he shares how he's actually positioning capital and talks through the ideas most investors are missing. Real-time analysis, specific names, and a bias toward what's overlooked rather than what's crowded.

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In this FSD episode, titled The Major Chord and the Minor Chord, Ram records on a rainy summer day, slightly under the weather, and finds the market in the same condition: running a little slower than usual. His frame for the moment is musical. AI has been the market's major chord, playing nonstop for most of the year up until Micron earnings. Since then the minor chord, quality, has taken over the melody. Good music has both, and so does a good bull market. He calls it hug your favorite CFA mode: quality businesses at good prices, and there are a lot of them out there.

The middle of the drive is a tour of what's actually working. Insurance names like Berkshire Hathaway, Marsh McLennan, and Travelers, which is in a lockout rally. Medical devices through the IHI ETF, with DaVita as the case study: a year and a half ago it traded at nine times earnings with 12 percent buybacks, totally hated and unloved, and it turned into a momentum stock. Regeneron just triggered on his mean reversion quality screen, though he doesn't own it yet. ICE and CME are the purest expression of the theme, indestructible businesses that will still be here in 50 years. Staples are working too, maybe a bit overheated, and he trimmed Philip Morris and Altria today.

The back half is the other side of the trade. AI semiconductor bottleneck stocks look terrible, with AAOI the poster child dropping below a key moving average, and Ram expects a washout there within days because crowded momentum takes time to unwind. The psychology of the market curve patterns the old Templeton guidance, and these names sit on the hope side, where the faith is almost religious. He closes with the tsunami metaphor: the water pulls back from the beach and the seashells left on the sand are the quality stocks, so when a trade gets crowded in one direction, run to the other side of the boat. It's still a bull market, the fundamentals and capex are intact, and both chords are going to play together.

(00:00) A rainy day and the market's two chords

About the show: Non-Consensus Investing is Ram Ahluwalia's running commentary on markets, where he shares how he's actually positioning capital and talks through the ideas most investors are missing. Real-time analysis, specific names, and a bias toward what's overlooked rather than what's crowded.

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