Michael Monaghan

Investing in the QQQs is one of the most nonsensical investments to make. Many mistakenly assume the QQQs are a tech fund (owns WMT, COST, etc) Pick 100 stocks *but only from one exchange* and market cap weight them. Why would you voluntarily choose to remove half of all stocks? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Someone said once that the 90s was the best decade because while technology was rapidly improving it was still in service of improving the quality of human life, not in service of mass information gathering and surveillance. After 9/11, everything changed. But in the 90s the tech was still helping everyone have cooler better lives.

• be Torakusu Yamaha • the son of a low-ranking samurai astronomer in 19th-century Japan • obsessed with Western machines, you make a living repairing watches and medical equipment • 1887: a local elementary school has a broken American reed organ. Nobody in the small town knows how to fix it. • you take it apart, realize it’s just two broken springs, and easily repair it • but instead of just handing it back, you realize: "If I can fix this, I can build it." • you draw a blueprint of the inside of the organ and build the very first Japanese-made reed organ from scratch • you show it off. People tell you it sounds terrible. • most people would quit. You sling the heavy wooden organ over your shoulder on a bamboo carrying pole. • you physically carry it 160 miles (250 km) on foot, trekking over the brutal Hakone mountains just to reach the Tokyo Music Institute to get real feedback from experts • the professors play it. They tell you the mechanics are brilliant, but the tuning is completely wrong. • you don't get defensive. You stay in Tokyo for a month, sitting in on university music theory lectures, holding a single tuning fork to your ear until you completely master the mathematics of sound frequencies • you walk 160 miles back home • you build a second organ. The professors test it and declare it "as good as those from abroad." • you found Nippon Gakki Co. (which later becomes Yamaha Corporation) • you decide to make your company logo three interlocking tuning forks to remember the pain and discipline of learning music theory from scratch • decades later, your company uses its piano woodworking expertise to build wooden airplane propellers in WWII • after the war, the company uses its new metallurgical expertise from the airplane engines to build motorcycles • you accidentally create a timeline where repairing a broken elementary school organ directly leads to the creation of the Yamaha YZF-R1 superbike • absolute, relentless horizontal integration based purely on figuring out how things work The ultimate testament to reverse-engineering reality.

Statement by President George W. Bush on Chuck Norris: "Laura and I are saddened by Chuck Norris’s passing. He was a legend in Texas and beyond. Through his foundation and his example, he made a huge difference in the lives of young people by instilling character and discipline through martial arts. It was said that when Chuck Norris entered a room, he didn’t turn the lights on; he turned the dark off. Laura and I are fortunate to have called him a friend, and we send our sympathy to his family."

Jensen Huang just called out every CEO who’s been firing people “because of AI.” Jim Cramer asked him why companies are laying people off if AI is supposed to make everyone MORE productive. Jensen's answer: "For companies with imagination, you will do more with more. For companies where the leadership is just out of ideas, they have nothing else to do. They have no reason to imagine greater than they are. When they have more capability, they don't do more." Read that again. The man who built the most important tech company on Earth just told you that if your CEO is using AI to cut headcount, it means one thing: They have no imagination. They have no vision for what comes next. They got handed the most powerful tool in human history and their FIRST instinct was to fire people. This is the CEO of NVIDIA. The company whose chips power every AI system on the planet. If anyone on Earth has the right to say "AI replaces workers," it's Jensen Huang. And he said the OPPOSITE. He said every carpenter could become an architect. Every plumber could become an architect. AI elevates capability. It doesn't eliminate it. But here's where it gets really interesting... During the same interview, Jensen revealed something nobody's talking about: He said AI startups like OpenAI and Anthropic are seeing their revenues increase by one to two billion dollars a WEEK. And he wishes these companies were public so the world could see what he sees. One to two billion per week. That's a $50 to $100 BILLION annualized run rate. For companies that most people think are burning cash and making nothing. The entire Wall Street narrative that "AI companies aren't profitable" might be completely wrong. Jensen sees their numbers. He sees their compute orders. He sees their growth. And he's saying the revenue is real. So if the money IS real, why are other companies firing people? Because they're not building AI products. They're not creating new revenue streams. They're not using AI to expand into new markets. They're using AI as an EXCUSE to cut costs because they ran out of ideas 3 years ago and need something to tell the board. Jensen's company added $500 billion in new orders in 5 months. He expects $1 trillion in cumulative revenue through 2027 from just two product lines. That number doesn't include the new chips, systems, or partnerships announced this week. And he's not cutting people. He's hiring. Because when you have imagination, more capability means MORE opportunity. Not less headcount. Meanwhile Salesforce cut thousands. Meta cut thousands. Amazon cut thousands. All blaming "AI efficiency." Jensen's response: You're out of imagination. He also said something that stuck with me. Cramer asked if he ever thought he'd build a $10 to $20 trillion company while waiting tables at Denny's. His answer: "I was just trying to make it through the shift." Biggest tip he ever got? Two, three dollars. Now he's building tech that increased computing demand by one million times in two years. He announced OpenClaw, which he says is as big as ChatGPT. And he's got 21 months of new business that isn't even counted in the trillion dollar figure yet. When asked how long he plans to keep working? "I'm hoping to die on the job. And I'm not hoping to die anytime soon." This is a man who believes every single thing he's building. And his message to every CEO using AI to justify layoffs is simple... You're not innovating. You're surrendering. The technology wasn't built to shrink companies. It was built to make them limitless. If your leadership can't see that, the problem isn't AI. It's THEM.

On this day in 2008: production starts for Tesla’s first vehicle, the Roadster.