Insights Into Our World This Week

SOMEBODY'S GOTTA HOLD THE BAG

We couldn't help but chuckle at this one...

Funny how history rhymes.

Every boom — whether AI, crypto, or anything else — has a way of dragging zombie companies back from the dead, rebranded with whatever buzzword happens to be in fashion. Remember how Long Island Iced Tea Corp quietly rebranded as Long Blockchain Corp a few years back and watched their stock go up 4x (albeit briefly)?

But we digress...

The thing about that 800% jump is… you'll need a magnifying glass to even find it on the long-term chart. The thing looks absolutely dreadful!

But you have to hand it to them: the Allbirds IPO timing was masterful.

They went public right at the peak of the ESG mania, offloading shares onto well-meaning retail investors who thought they were saving the spotted owl by buying into an "eco-friendly shoe company." Classic exit liquidity play!

With SpaceX and a handful of other high-profile tech and AI names lining up to go public in the coming months, we can't help but wonder how many of them will ultimately follow the same trajectory.

When the hottest private company on the planet starts offloading shares to retail, that's your signal.

YESTERDAY'S ENERGY BOOM, TODAY'S TECH BUBBLE

And lest you think we're all doom and gloom on tech and permanently married to energy, a quick history lesson...

Go back to 2011. Oil had surged from $34 in 2009 to $108, and the financial press was falling over itself to call for $150 oil (or higher). Energy could do no wrong. Barron's captured the zeitgeist perfectly:

Meanwhile, nobody wanted to touch tech with a barge pole. Microsoft and Nvidia spent years grinding sideways. Crazy, in hindsight… because that sideways grind was precisely when you wanted to be loading up.

Fast forward to today and the picture is almost perfectly inverted.

A decade-long tech bull market has made energy the unloved stepchild of the S&P 500, while the Magnificent 7 can apparently do no wrong.

We've seen this movie before. Markets have a long memory (and a habit of humbling the consensus). The rotation from "this can only go up" to "why would anyone own that?" has a way of happening faster than anyone expects… and it usually starts right around the time you start seeing magazine covers like these.

CONSIDER US AI BULLS!

Staying with the intersection of energy and tech for a moment...

As we noted earlier in this very newsletter: AI is both a revolutionary technology and a bubble waiting to burst. Much like the internet rewired the world and still managed to vaporize 80% of dot-com companies along the way.

We're actually incredibly bullish on AI. Just not in the way most people think. We’ll let the AI man himself fill in the blanks...

1,000x more energy!? But here's the problem:

From the article:

"The U.S. needs about 5,000 miles of high-voltage transmission per year to keep pace with electricity demand. In 2024, just 888 miles were completed. That gap is widening even as data center developers race to bring tens of gigawatts of new load online. The result is a structural mismatch between the speed at which demand arrives and the speed at which the grid can absorb it.

Global electricity demand from data centers grew by 17% in 2025, with AI-focused data center electricity consumption growing even faster, surging 50%. In the U.S., data centers now account for about half of the country's incremental demand growth."

When you strip away all the hype, AI is ultimately an energy play.

Or perhaps more accurately, energy is the AI play. And yet energy stocks remain as unloved as they've been in 50 years. We'll take it!