Two things AI can’t replace:

1.  Taste

2.  Real life human experiences

Concerts, festivals, events, standing in a crowd with other people who came for the same reason. The kind of thing you can’t and don’t want to fully digitize or outsource to a screen.

I think demand for this is going to grow more than most people currently price in. You can already feel it when you’re at shows. People soak it up differently now. There’s a hunger for the real thing that got louder after years of screens and remote everything.

LiveNation ($LYV) is the default business for this. They’re the largest concert promoter in the world, they own Ticketmaster & they sit across venues, promotion + ticketing. In Q2 they did $7.7 billion in revenue, up 9%. Fan attendance is still growing & their machine is running.

Main competitor is AEG. They’re good, but they’re not at the same scale.

The obvious risk is the monopoly story. LiveNation has been under constant pressure for years over Ticketmaster and how tightly they control the stack. There was a DOJ case, a settlement & then a jury still found them liable on the monopoly side in the state cases.

The “live” thesis stands outside the usual AI and software narratives. It’s also one of the few areas where field research is actually fun: you just go to events and talk to people.

I’m not a big fan of being contrarian just for the sake of it. Most of the time the “crowded trade” makes more sense and more $$$ if you buy it right. But here the more contrarian angle looks cleaner. The world is getting more digital & the appetite for the real thing is not going away.

Thanks for reading and for being part of the community.

FJ

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btw this is our current portfolio performance as of today for those who are interested:

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I do not claim to know the future. What follows is my current best estimate of the world in 2036, based on the structural forces I have been tracking. I will update it when the evidence changes.

The core picture

By 2036 the decisive divide will be between people who own productive capability and people who operate it.

AI will have restructured who can create value at scale. The companies and individuals that control the best models, data, compute & distribution will sit in a different economic class from everyone else.

I put roughly 70% probability on a world where a small number of category-defining companies and the people behind them capture a large share of the economic upside from AI, robotics & related infrastructure. The remaining 30% covers scenarios where regulation, open-source diffusion or unexpected political pushback slows that concentration more than expected.

Three structural forces

1.) Ownership of capability becomes the central economic question.

Human labor will still exist but its relative value will keep falling in many knowledge and routine service jobs. The people and firms that own the systems that replace or amplify labor will do disproportionately well.

2.) Power shifts from the edges first.

New advantages tend to appear in markets, geographies & technical domains that existing institutions undervalue. By the time the “center” notices and tries to regulate or copy, the lead is often already substantial.

3.) Democratic legitimacy lags technological speed.

The decisions that shape the next decade of AI development are being made largely inside private labs and a handful of companies. Governments will react, sometimes effectively, often slowly. The gap between what technology can do and what political systems can govern will remain one of the defining tensions of the 2030s.

Ok… and what does this mean in real life?

For investing, the implication is straightforward. The highest expected returns will sit with the few companies that become the clear category owners in the key layers: foundation models/ infrastructure, enterprise adoption layers, physical AI/ robotics & the supporting energy/ compute stack.

For living, the implication is ownership and optionality. Relying solely on wages from work that can be automated is a weaker position than it was ten years ago. Building or owning something that benefits from the shift is stronger.

I’m not calling for utopia and I’m not calling for collapse either. I’m just laying out the range of outcomes that currently looks most likely given the incentives and where the technology is actually going. The future isn’t “locked in” but the forces already moving look stronger than most of the political and cultural pushback I see right now.

This is the map I’m working with right now & I’ll update it when reality forces the update.

Thanks for reading!

FJ

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And here’s how I personally position myself for the decade ahead:

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The optimist thinks everything is already so good that nothing needs to be done.
The pessimist thinks everything is so broken that nothing is worth doing.

Both are useless.

The only useful position is the critical optimist. You see the risks clearly. You don’t pretend the problems don’t exist. But you still put your capital and your attention behind the people and the organizations that are actually building something larger than themselves.

I have zero interest in the permanent short. The one who spends a life explaining why everything will fail and why the future is dark.

What we do here is simpler. We try to identify the small number of organizations that are category-defining. The ones that marry innovation, manufacturing and distribution. Then we own them for a long time.

The decade ahead will be shaped by a handful of these organizations and not by the people who write endless essays about why it can’t work.

We are long the builders and we are long the ones who still believe the future can be better than the present and are willing to do the hard work to make it so.

I call it The Big Long

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The old rules are losing their power. The next decade will not look like the last one & most of the frameworks we grew up with will not be enough.

I grew up as a classic value investor. Ben Graham, Buffett, Munger, Klarman, Greenblatt and Later I moved closer to Peter Lynch and Stanley Druckenmiller. I studied what the best private equity people did. I l…

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Again, I’ll get directly to the point.

Q2 update from an owner’s seat:

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I’ll keep this update short and brief to save your time reading and my time writing. I’ll get directly to the point:

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I’ve been going deep on the AI + biology space for months. After comparing different approaches, teams, data moats, and clinical progress, Recursion, ticker symbol $RXRX stands out as the one I’m most excited to build a significant position in. This is a platform and operating system bet with the potential to become a category-defining company for the next decade and beyond.

From Data Factory to Better Drugs: Inside Recursion's AI-Native Product Engine

Here is my detailed thinking.

The Core Thesis: An Industrial Operating System for Biology

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This AI + biology space is still in the very early innings. Development is moving extremely fast, and I’m fully prepared for some of my bets in this frontier to go to zero. These are VC-like high-conviction bets on the best teams building at the edge of what’s possible — totally different from the more durable setups like Oscar Health or Amazon.

I’ve been thinking a lot about where the real alpha will come from over the next 10–20 years.

The one that creates entirely new capabilities no one thought possible.

We’ve already covered Natera and Caris in depth. Both are excellent in their domains. But after deeper research, my highest-conviction personal pick in the AI + biology intersection is Recursion Pharmaceuticals ($RXRX).

I’ll be transparent: this is the position I’m most excited to build over time. Recursion is building an industrial-scale operating system to decode biology with AI, automated labs, and massive proprietary data. The Exscientia merger strengthened the chemistry side. Recent clinical progress (positive Phase 2 POC in FAP), strong partnerships, and a massive addressable market make this one of the most asymmetric bets in public markets right now.

Portfolio Moves This Period

To keep things clean, simple and high-conviction, I made a few adjustments:

Full details on exact position sizing, average costs, updated portfolio allocation, and my complete reasoning for every move are available to paid subscribers only.

If you’ve been on the fence, now is the time to join.

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These are my current holdings and earlier this year we also closed two positions at a profit before rotating capital into the current portfolio.

Closed positions

Apollo Global (APO), +16.86%

Green Brick Partners (GRBK), +10.49%

Current holdings as of July 2026

Oscar Health (OSCR), avg. entry $13.19, current ~$31.90, +142%

Natera (NTRA), avg. entry $210.00, cu…

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A company that burned through $245 million in a single year just flipped to positive free cash flow. Revenue grew 79% in the most recent quarter. The stock is down 57% from its all-time high. It just launched three new products powered by the same database that took eighteen years to build. And the most sophisticated institutional investors in precision oncology are accumulating.

This is the kind of setup that has made fortunes in healthcare.

The company sits at the intersection of molecular biology, artificial intelligence, and early cancer detection — three of the most consequential forces in medicine over the next two decades. It owns a database that cannot be replicated. Its pricing power is rising every quarter. Its cash flow has inflected. And the market has not yet decided what to do with it.

The window to enter before consensus forms is open. It will not stay open long.

Join FJR now to read the full analysis — including the company name, the ticker, the full business breakdown, the competitive landscape, the risk assessment, and where I stand on valuation.

$49 a year. Yes a year!

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Over the past year and a half I have been working on something that sits outside of FJR but connects directly to why I do this work.

It is called Dialectical Imagination. A publication built around one idea: that the best conclusions are never the product of a single voice, but of genuine dialogue with the sharpest opposing view you can find. That is the…

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Today, Midjourney announced something that stopped me in my tracks. You probably know them as the AI image generation company that turns text prompts into pictures.

They are building a full-body Ultrasonic CT scanner. A 60-second whole-body scan. Positioned not as a hospital procedure but as something you walk into like a spa appointment. They are callin…

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Oscar Health is up approximately 130% from where I recommended it aggressively in the $12 range. And I want to talk about what that means, what comes next, and where my head is at right now.

But first. The most important lesson this trade has taught me.

The Only Edge That Matters

When the market sold off and Oscar fell back toward $11, I wrote a note calle…

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I initiated a position in Amazon yesterday at $249 per share. It is now my fourth stock and I want to be straightforward about the thesis because there is not much to hide here.

Amazon is the most analyzed company on earth. Every analyst covers it. Almost every fund owns it. There is no secret insight I can offer that 10,000 smarter people have not alrea…

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In 2022, the smartest investors on earth were accumulating AI positions while the rest of the world was distracted by inflation, rate hikes, and recession fears.

Nvidia was trading at $130. Meta had just been written off by every analyst on Wall Street after its metaverse pivot. Microsoft was considered a boring legacy tech company. The narrativ…

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There are ideas you follow. And then there are ideas you own. The difference between the two is not information. It is conviction. And conviction, as I have said before, cannot be borrowed. It is built slowly, through repeated verification, through sitting with an idea long enough to understand it at its core, through watching the clinical evidence accumulate, the financial inflections arrive, and the thesis strengthen quarter by quarter while the market is looking somewhere else.

I have been following this company for years. I wrote about it twice. I watched it closely. I waited. This week I stopped waiting. I initiated a new position. It is now the No 3. holding in my portfolio, behind Oscar Health and Mercado Libre.

The hook today is simple. One of the greatest investors alive — a man who ran George Soros’s Quantum Fund for 14 years without a single down year and averaged 30% annual returns across his career — just added significantly to this position in Q1 2026.

I am not a follower. But when someone of that caliber keeps adding to the same thesis I have been building independently, it reinforces what the research already told me. I finally pulled the trigger

The name of this company and the full position rationale are exclusively for paid members of FJ Research. I have written about this company twice before. Both reports are linked below for paid subscribers — follow the development of this thesis from the beginning. $49 a year. 13 cents a day. Subscribe now.

Paid subscribers: the full update continues below. My two earlier reports on this company are linked at the bottom of this post — I encourage you to read them in sequence to see how this thesis developed.

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Oscar Health is up significantly over the past few weeks.

For everyone who followed the research and held through the noise, you are sitting on healthy gains right now. That feels good. It should.

But I want to be direct about something.

The question I have been getting most is whether I am taking profits or reducing my position. The answer is no. Not a si…

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I run a two stock portfolio. Oscar Health and Mercado Libre. This week both reported earnings. This week both delivered.

But I want to be honest about something. The numbers are everywhere. You don’t need me to read them to you.

What you need from me is what I actually think.

Here is what I think.

Mercado Libre is building something that most Weste…

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Oscar Health just delivered one of the strongest quarters in its history.

3.2 million members. Up 56% year over year. The short sellers said membership would collapse after ACA subsidies expired. It did not. It accelerated.

Revenue hit $4.6 billion. Up 53%. Earnings from operations reached $704 million. Nearly 2.5x what they produced a year ago. …

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As of this week I run a two-stock portfolio. Oscar Health is number one. Mercado Libre is number two. Everything else is cash.

Let me explain the second position.

The Spawner Playing the Amazon Playbook

Mercado Libre is not an e-commerce company. That label is like calling Amazon a bookstore in 2005. It is a spawner, a business that builds one dom…

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