This Week · 12 Podcasts · Week of June 12, 2026
This week we bring you twelve exceptional conversations mapping a single fault line from every side — whether the AI-and-index complex now carrying the S&P is a late-stage mania or a genuine earnings super cycle, and what the energy shock, the Fed, and the geopolitical backdrop do to the answer. Bill Smead opens with the unhedged bear case: the chip trade is the most cyclical business of his career, the index has roughly the odds of the man on the moon over the next decade, and the durable money has rotated into energy, regional banks, and home builders. Seth Klarman concedes the moment has the characteristics of a bubble and shows how a downside-first value shop hunts the AI-agnostic, distressed credit, and commercial real estate while treating the model labs as un-investable. Ted Oakley calls it a lemming market — five good years surrendered in a single sixth — and lays out the IPO-mania tell, the boomer unwind of a $30 trillion passive bid, and his commodity-and-Treasury barbell. Jim Chanos goes further, calling the SpaceX offering a hopes-and-dreams IPO and the broader boom bigger than dot-com, with a capex-driven profit mirage inflating S&P earnings exactly as it did in 1999. Against that bear chorus, Stacy Rasgon delivers the steelman to Steve Eisman: semis are the center of the universe, the year’s gains are earnings rather than multiple expansion, and the only real ceiling is power. Ed Zitron supplies the view from inside the machine — token-based billing exposing an industry with no measurable ROI and compute commitments two unprofitable companies cannot meet. John Mearsheimer provides the geopolitical backbone: an Iran war that is far from over and an escalation ladder the US cannot climb. Niall Ferguson dissents from the other side, arguing the US made a reversible strategic error by declining to retake the Strait of Hormuz by force, and that the deal now being haggled may be a defeat. Luke Gromen translates the bind into a brutal binary for new Fed chair Warsh — the dollar or the bond market — as the physical world threatens to kick the financial one in the head. Lyn Alden answers with the more measured read on the same fiscal-dominance regime: a gradual, persistent print rather than a sudden break, and a steady migration from Treasuries into gold. A feature breakdown of Robert Shiller’s latest warning frames the valuation peril — a CAPE at the second-highest reading in 145 years and a wealth-effect chain running from the brokerage account to the front door. And Melody Wright closes on the ground in housing, dismantling the inventory-shortage myth and timing the distress she expects to surface by the fourth quarter. Each summary is designed to be immediately actionable — whether you are allocating capital, running a business, or simply trying to understand the forces reshaping the world around you.
THIS WEEK’S LINEUP
EP 1 — A Virtual Guarantee the AI Trade Crashes and Burns — Bill Smead — Smead Capital Management Founder & CIO — Watch Full Video
EP 2 — This Has the Characteristics of a Bubble — Seth Klarman — Baupost Group CEO — Watch Full Video
EP 3 — Lemming Markets and the Boomer Unwind — Ted Oakley — Oxbow Advisors Managing Partner & Founder — Watch Full Video
EP 4 — Bigger Than Dot-Com: The Hopes-and-Dreams IPO — Jim Chanos — Founder, Chanos & Company (formerly Kynikos Associates) — Watch Full Video
EP 5 — The Center of the Universe: The Bull Case for Semis — Stacy Rasgon — Bernstein Senior Semiconductor Analyst, on The Real Eisman Playbook with Steve Eisman — Watch Full Video
EP 6 — Cooked by 2027: The Bubble From Inside the Machine — Ed Zitron — EZPR Founder & CEO, “Better Offline” Host — Watch Full Video
EP 7 — Why the War Is Far From Over — John Mearsheimer — University of Chicago Political Scientist — Watch Full Video
EP 8 — Schrödinger’s Ceasefire: Has the US Lost the Iran War? — Niall Ferguson — Historian, Hoover Institution Senior Fellow — Watch Full Video
EP 9 — Warsh Must Choose: The Dollar or the Bond Market — Luke Gromen — Forest for the Trees (FFTT) Founder & President — Watch Full Video
EP 10 — World of Chaos: Fiscal Dominance and the Gradual Print — Lyn Alden — Founder, Lyn Alden Investment Strategy — Watch Full Video
EP 11 — Shiller’s Warning: The Second-Biggest Bubble in History — Robert Shiller — Yale Nobel Laureate (Documentary Feature) — Watch Full Video
EP 12 — They’re Lying About the Housing Shortage — Melody Wright — Founder, Huringa (Mortgage Strategy & Technology Advisory) — Watch Full Video
Full summaries with actionable insights and investment focus for each podcast follow below.
EP 1 — A Virtual Guarantee the AI Trade Crashes and Burns
Bill Smead — Smead Capital Management Founder & CIO
Bill Smead, founder and CIO of Smead Capital Management, joins David Lin to argue that the era of low rates and mania-level valuations is ending, and that the AI-and-chip complex carrying the index is a virtual guarantee to crash and burn. In his 46th year in the business, Smead’s case is that this is the worst possible starting point for buy-and-hold — the mirror image of 1982 — and that the durable money now sits in the roughly 200 S&P names that have nothing to do with AI: energy, regional banks, and home builders. His tone is unhedged, his historical pattern-matching is the spine of the argument, and his prescription is a hard rotation away from the index everyone has been taught to buy.
Actionable Bullet Points
There Is No Chance for the S&P, and It Is Math, Not Mood: Smead’s core claim is that this is the worst possible entry point for the index — the mirror image of 1982, when he came into a market trading at six times earnings, paying a 5% dividend, against 14–15% Treasury yields (2:31), the setup that made buy-and-hold work for 40 years as rates fell from 1981 to their 2021 bottom. Today the multiple sits near 21 against a historical norm he pegs at 15–16, and every long-horizon gauge — Shiller CAPE, the Buffett market-cap-to-GDP indicator — points the same way (32:08): the two prior analogues, 1972–82 and 1999–2009, each delivered a lost decade of negative real returns including dividends (31:54). His verdict is blunt — there is no chance for the S&P 500 to do well, and the industry spent 30 years teaching people the opposite (32:19). Stop treating the index as a savings account.
It Is Always Different This Time, and It Always Rhymes: Smead concedes the bulls are right that AI is different — it is chips, not fiber, not railroads, not the Nifty Fifty — but insists the rhyme is the mania itself, not the technology. Breadth has collapsed into a tell: a Bank of America note flags just 21 stocks, about 4% of the index, making new highs, versus 20 at the March 2000 dot-com top (9:54), while roughly half the index’s money now sits in those same 21 names (28:53). His historical anchor is Bezos on the cover of Time as 1999’s person of the year, weeks before Amazon fell 85% over the following 18 months (11:47) — and the creators of AI were named Time’s person of the year this past December (12:12). The predictive point is that the great companies survive but the early buyers do not. Do not confuse being right about the technology with making money on the stock.
Energy Is the Trade the Index Is Mispricing: Against a tape pricing crude near $70 and an administration still dreaming of $60, Smead calls the oil complex materially undervalued (22:46), arguing a settled-up Iran does not send oil back to $60 and that anyone expecting it is, in his words, smoking the wrong thing (21:16). At $90 a barrel his names earn a year’s free cash flow in 90 days (23:32); he owns Apache, Occidental, and Cenovus — the last for its 25-year Canadian well lives — and expects buybacks and industry consolidation as the next leg (24:05). The structural case is rising global demand led by Africa and India against depleting sources, with a preferred $80–100 band that avoids demand destruction (26:55). Treat sustained higher energy as the trigger that can break 15 years of momentum psychology.
Own the 40% of the Index That Has Nothing to Do With AI: Smead’s positive thesis is that the mania ruins roughly 60% of the S&P but finally makes the other 200-odd names interesting for the first time in years (9:20). Inside financials he has trimmed the big capital-markets-levered banks and rotated into plain deposit-and-loan regionals — Fifth Third, which he praises for its acquisition of Comerica, and Western Alliance — precisely because they are insulated from the advisor-and-asset-gathering complex he expects to be gutted in a real drawdown (35:16). His prediction is a financial-advisor shakeout on the scale of 2006–2009 once the passive bid fails. Position in the boring balance-sheet compounders, not the market-sensitive franchises.
Home Builders for the No-Hope Entry: Smead’s highest-conviction contrarian call is housing, where the US is building homes at the lowest share of population in 50–60 years outside the 2008 depression (37:40), against 90-million-plus people in each of the two largest under-housed age cohorts. He notes Buffett just bought builder Taylor Morrison for roughly $8 billion (38:56), while Smead owns Lennar, D.R. Horton, and NVR (39:05); his framing is that you buy builders when there is no hope and low prices, and that a 30-year, tax-deductible mortgage remains the surest wealth-building instrument in America (19:01). The wealth-transfer kicker is the largest cohort of wealthy 60-to-80-year-olds in history funding their children’s down payments, or buying rentals when stocks sour. Accumulate the builders into the gloom, not the euphoria.
Investment Focus
Smead’s framework is the week’s most complete value-and-rates case for why passive ownership is now the crowded trade. The investment template: (1) cut reliance on the cap-weighted index, which carries roughly half its money in 21 names and, on every historical valuation gauge, has decade-ahead return prospects he likens to the man on the moon (32:08); (2) overweight energy — Apache, Occidental, Cenovus — as the cash-gushing, under-owned hedge against a $60 oil fantasy that will not materialize (22:46); (3) rotate financials from market-levered megabanks into deposit-and-loan regionals such as Fifth Third and Western Alliance ahead of an advisor-industry shakeout (35:16); (4) accumulate home builders — Lennar, D.R. Horton, NVR — into a structurally under-supplied housing market while sentiment is bombed out (37:40); (5) read sustained $80-plus energy as the psychological trigger most likely to end the momentum regime, and treat any AI-led flight to safety as the moment rates fall and the rotation accelerates.
EP 2 — This Has the Characteristics of a Bubble
Seth Klarman — Baupost Group CEO
Seth Klarman, CEO of the Baupost Group, sits for a rare on-camera market conversation with CNBC and delivers the value investor’s verdict: this has the characteristics of a bubble, even if the technology proves real. Across 44 years and only five down years — the worst around 10% — Baupost’s edge is downside-first: meticulous fundamental research, no portfolio leverage, senior securities, cash held in the absence of opportunity, and cross-asset macro hedges. Founded on $27 million of family capital, the firm is now hunting where the AI narrative is not — the AI-agnostic, the mispriced “AI losers,” distressed credit, and commercial real estate — while treating the headline LLM champions as un-investable.
Actionable Bullet Points
It Has the Characteristics of a Bubble: Klarman’s central judgment is measured but unambiguous — the environment is stretched and carries the hallmarks of a bubble, captured by the absurdity of a shoe company adding “AI” to its name and watching its stock pop (3:53). His analytical objection is that AI introduces enormous, irreducible uncertainty — winner-take-all or many winners, today’s leaders or tomorrow’s, AGI or not — and a market facing that much uncertainty should rationally trade at a lower multiple, yet multiples keep rising and some names carry 40-times or effectively infinite valuations (6:27). The predictive implication is that even if the technology lands at the high end of expectations, the price paid still has to make sense. Demand a margin of safety the current multiple does not offer.
Value Is Not Paint-By-Numbers, and the Ice Cubes Melt Faster Now: Klarman is emphatic that low-multiple screening misunderstands value — the right question is what a business is worth, and a growing business is worth more than a stagnant one (5:43). His warning is that the melting ice cubes of structurally challenged businesses are melting faster than ever, so a four-times-cash-flow optical bargain can be a value trap if the franchise is eroding (5:56). The takeaway is to anchor on durable, knowable cash flows rather than headline cheapness. Refuse to buy cheapness that is dissolving.
Hunt the AI-Agnostic and the Mispriced “AI Losers”: Where the crowd chases AI winners and shuns everything else, Klarman is deliberately fishing the neglected pools — businesses AI will barely touch, such as roofing and housing supplies, whose prices are quietly drifting lower (11:03), and perceived AI losers like clobbered software-related credits trading at very low multiples through the debt layer that may not actually be losers (4:52). Even his AI exposure is value-sourced: roughly 10% of the book sits in cash machines like Amazon and Google, the latter bought a few years ago at a below-market multiple on no heroic assumptions (7:15). The prescription is to let others overpay for certainty and buy the overlooked. Get paid for the uncertainty everyone else is avoiding.
The Model Companies Are Cash Incinerators, So Buy the Land Instead: Klarman is plainly uninvolved in the trillion-dollar LLM names, observing they must keep eating cash to stay trained and current, with no guarantee they remain the winners — not Buffett’s definition of a great business, and enormous valuations for companies years from bottom-line profit (9:46). His expression of the theme is structural, not speculative: Baupost owns raw land with adjacent power as cheap optionality on future data-center sites (8:12), and bought into a non-China Asian data-center business in the private market at roughly 40% of public multiples (9:24). The lesson is to capture the buildout’s economics without underwriting the model labs. Own the picks-and-shovels optionality, not the cash-burning frontier.
The Underpriced Risks Are Debt, Energy, and the Real-Estate Logjam Breaking: Klarman flags risks he believes the market is discounting — US debt through 100% of GDP with structural deficits adding $2 trillion-plus a year, leaving the risk-free asset riskier every day (17:39) — and an energy shock the market is ignoring, since a multi-month Strait of Hormuz closure could send oil to $150 or higher, with gasoline above $6 a November political problem (20:26). His favorite single idea sits on the other side of fear: assisted living, battered since COVID and only now beginning to turn (24:40), part of a broader real-estate thesis of buying at significant discounts to replacement cost without heroic assumptions (12:42). Lean into the distress others are too exhausted to touch.
Investment Focus
Klarman’s framework is the week’s clearest demonstration of how a downside-first discipline navigates a narrative-driven market. The investment template: (1) accept the bubble characterization operationally — demand a margin of safety the prevailing 40-times-and-up multiples do not provide (6:27); (2) overweight the AI-agnostic and mispriced “AI losers” — neglected real-economy businesses and clobbered software credits — where price is drifting away from value (11:03); (3) take AI exposure only through cash-generative versatility bought cheap, such as Amazon and Google at below-market multiples, not the model labs (7:15); (4) capture the buildout via picks-and-shovels optionality — powered land and discounted private data-center assets — rather than OpenAI or Anthropic, which remain cash incinerators (9:46); (5) treat US debt dynamics and a Hormuz energy shock as underpriced tail risks, and deploy into genuine distress — assisted living and replacement-cost real estate — as the patient, contrarian source of return (24:40).
EP 3 — Lemming Markets and the Boomer Unwind
Ted Oakley — Oxbow Advisors Managing Partner & Founder
Ted Oakley, managing partner and founder of Oxbow Advisors, joins Adam Taggart on Thoughtful Money to argue Wall Street is marching investors off a cliff in classic late-cycle fashion. His metaphor is the lemming market: a herd chasing every IPO and every semiconductor until it runs off the edge together. The economy shows no imminent recession, but the speculation, the IPO flood, and the demographics all point the same direction — and Oakley’s response is a disciplined value-and-hard-asset book with a large cash reserve, waiting for the herd to do what herds do.
Actionable Bullet Points
The Lemming Market and the Six-Year Round Trip: Oakley’s framing device is the lemming market — investors chasing each other off the cliff (20:54) — and the arithmetic underneath it is the warning: an investor can compound 15–20% a year in the S&P for five years and surrender the entire gain in a single 50%-down sixth year, ending six years with nothing (21:13). The discipline he draws from it is that protecting capital through the mania means returning to new highs quickly, versus needing 150% just to break even after a generational drawdown. His read is that this is late-stage, frothy, and greedy, and that it can run a while longer — possibly one more S&P high, perhaps above 8,000, before it ends (30:52). Treat the next new high as a chance to de-risk, not to chase.
The IPO Flood Is the Late-Cycle Tell, and the Buyer Is Exit Liquidity: Oakley’s clearest signal is the rush of supply — he has never seen interest like the demand for SpaceX, with Google’s and Meta’s offerings queued behind it (3:14) — because issuance is easy only when greed is high, and the insiders know it. His historical anchor is damning: of the top 10 IPOs of the last 20 years, roughly 70% traded lower a year later (11:51), and the best investor alive, Buffett, essentially never buys IPOs (12:11). With SpaceX reportedly four-times oversubscribed and the bankers told what price to print (13:32), he reads the enthusiasm as the public becoming exit liquidity. Decline the hot offering; wait for the post-IPO disappointment.
The Boomer Unwind Will Drain the Passive Bid: Oakley’s structural call is demographic — baby boomers own roughly half the market, about $30 trillion, and over the next five to ten years that cohort gets older, sicker, and more risk-averse (23:58); ten years out the average boomer is 82–83 (28:44). Because today’s retirees hold a higher equity allocation than any prior retired generation — and Gen X and millennials higher still — the natural path is from contributing to the passive bid to drawing it down, a flow that reverses the mechanical inflows that lifted everything (26:50). The predictive read is that the marginal buyer becomes the marginal seller. Do not assume the passive flood keeps flowing.
The Hard-Asset Barbell: Commodities, Energy, and the Re-Entry in Gold: Oakley plays the AI-buildout narrative from the cheap side — owning the copper, energy, and natural gas a data center cannot run without, rather than the semis themselves (35:11) — and frames a multi-year commodity bull on hoarding, as nations stop cooperating and stockpile oil, copper, and critical minerals (39:26). He flags Jeff Currie’s warning that drawn-down oil storage tanks begin to bite around July (39:19), alongside the dark-fiber analogy for an AI overbuild that takes years to absorb (35:33). Having cut gold, miners, and silver early in the year after a 211% silver gain in 2025, he is ready to re-add below $4,000 gold, with Agnico Eagle his top holding bought four years ago (6:14). Use the commodity sell-off to rebuild hard-asset exposure.
Discipline, Treasuries, and the Windfall Playbook: Oakley’s positioning is roughly 45% short-term Treasuries (40:25), a value book that buys a dollar of worth for 70–80 cents (45:04), and the patience to note that five of the seven mega-cap names sit below their October 2025 levels even as the index grinds higher (41:10). His advice to anyone receiving a windfall is severe and specific: ice essentially all of it in sub-one-year Treasuries and survive the next 12–18 months, because preservation of capital comes first and the statistics say do little here (57:36). The behavioral edge he prizes is memory — clients who remember how hard the money was to make are the ones who keep it. Hold the dry powder; let the lemmings run.
Investment Focus
Oakley’s framework is the week’s most experience-driven case for capital preservation as an active strategy. The investment template: (1) treat any further S&P high — even a melt-up toward 8,000 — as a de-risking opportunity rather than a chase, given the six-year round-trip math (21:13); (2) avoid the IPO complex outright — SpaceX, and the OpenAI/Anthropic listings behind it — where history says roughly 70% trade lower within a year and the buyer is exit liquidity (11:51); (3) anticipate the boomer unwind of a roughly $30 trillion equity position as the structural drain on the passive bid (23:58); (4) own the commodity buildout from the cheap side — copper, energy, natural gas, and gold miners such as Agnico Eagle re-entered below $4,000 — on a multi-year hoarding thesis (39:26); (5) carry a large short-term Treasury reserve (~45%) and a strict buy-a-dollar-for-70-cents value discipline, prioritizing preservation through the next 12–18 months (40:25).
EP 4 — Bigger Than Dot-Com: The Hopes-and-Dreams IPO
Jim Chanos — Founder, Chanos & Company (formerly Kynikos Associates)
Jim Chanos, the legendary short seller behind Chanos & Company (formerly Kynikos Associates), delivers what he frames as a warning bigger than the dot-com bubble, days before SpaceX’s IPO. A $75 billion offering at a near-$2 trillion valuation, on $19 billion of revenue and negative free cash flow, is in his words a hopes-and-dreams deal — and a bellwether for a tech sector inflated by the same capex-boom accounting that flattered S&P earnings in 1999. Where Rasgon (EP 5) sees real earnings, Chanos sees a profit mirage; and where the bulls and even fellow bear Zitron treat power as the binding constraint, Chanos argues the US is not short of power at all.
Actionable Bullet Points
The Hopes-and-Dreams IPO: Chanos’s anchor is the SpaceX offering — a $75 billion IPO at a valuation near $2 trillion on roughly $19 billion of revenue and negative free cash flow, four-times oversubscribed (0:31). His objection is that the company is not worth $1.75 trillion on any reasonable five-year assumptions, because the valuation rests on the infinite addressable market of space plus AI rather than the core profitable Starlink business, whose growth slowed last quarter (4:14). Using Tesla as a template — a stock that trades on a premium to the CEO’s promises — he notes SpaceX is coming at roughly 90 times revenue versus a normal 10–15 (2:55). Read the deal as a bellwether, not a one-off.
Bull Markets Price Promises; Bear Markets Price Reality: Chanos’s framing of the regime is that an infinite addressable market — Mars colonies, moon factories, data centers in space — lets promoters build any story they want to justify a valuation (3:06), and that in bull markets you put a premium on promises while in bear markets you put a discount on reality (3:27). His read is that the market is clearly still in the former. The lesson is that the story is doing the work the cash flows cannot. Discount the narrative premium before it reverses.
Data Centers Are a Bad Business — and the Neoclouds Are Worse: Chanos has been bearish on data centers since 2022 on a simple ground: the long-standing operators earn only mid-to-low-single-digit pretax returns on capital, and the neoclouds (such as CoreWeave) are effectively equipment-leasing businesses betting on depreciation and chip supply (8:50). His rule for the chain is that a middleman — a REIT or leasing company that buys chips from Nvidia and rents them out — should never trade at a higher multiple than the supplier that controls its inputs, namely Taiwan Semi, Nvidia, or AMD (9:30). The predictive point is a coming re-rating as investors finally separate commodity from special. Avoid the price-takers trading like the price-makers.
The CapEx Boom Is a Profit Mirage: Chanos’s sharpest analytical point — and his direct rebuttal to the bull case — is that a capex boom is tremendously stimulative to reported profits over the short term, because the seller books revenue and profit immediately while the buyer capitalizes the spend and writes it off over years (16:49). He draws the 1999 parallel precisely: S&P earnings rose about 30% from 1998 to 2000, then fell roughly 40% from mid-2000 to mid-2001 as order books were pulled (17:39). His warning is that today’s fast-rising S&P earnings estimates are the same mechanism — a handful of vendors booking the buildout — and deserve a lower multiple, not a higher one. Treat the earnings acceleration as the setup, not the support.
The Contrarian Call: We Are Not Short of Power: Against the near-universal “power is the bottleneck” thesis — held by Rasgon, Zitron, and Wright alike — Chanos argues the one thing the US is not short of is power: there is plenty of natural gas, and the real constraints are turbines and permitting, which clear in two to three years (22:48). His corollary is that if AI is as big as everyone claims, power will not be the bottleneck, leaving the alternative-energy and small-nuclear stocks trading at 50–70 times earnings as overpriced third-and-fourth choices to power a data center (22:08) — especially since power is only about 5–7% of a data center’s revenue (24:08). Fade the power-scarcity trade as the crowded misread.
Investment Focus
Chanos’s framework is the week’s most experienced short-seller case that the AI-and-issuance boom rhymes with 1999 at a larger scale. The investment template: (1) treat the SpaceX IPO as a bellwether for a stretched tech sector — a near-$2 trillion valuation on $19 billion of revenue rests on promise, not cash flow (0:31); (2) discount the narrative premium, recognizing the market is pricing promises rather than reality (3:27); (3) avoid the data-center middlemen — REITs and neoclouds earning single-digit returns and trading above the suppliers that control their chips (9:30); (4) read fast-rising S&P earnings as a capex-boom mirage that historically reverses hard, as it did with the 40% earnings drop into 2001 (17:39); (5) be skeptical of the power-scarcity trade — Chanos’s contrarian view is that turbines and permitting, not power itself, are the temporary constraint, leaving alternative-energy and nuclear names overvalued (22:48). Note this directly contradicts the power-as-binding-constraint view held elsewhere in this edition.
