Transcript was automatically generated.

0:00:02 – Announcer

Wall Street Unplugged looks beyond the regular headlines heard on mainstream financial media to bring you unscripted interviews and breaking commentary direct from Wall Street right to you on Main Street.

0:00:16 – Daniel Creech

How’s it going out there? It’s Wednesday, January 8th, 2025, and you’re listening to the Wall Street Unplugged podcast, where normally Frank Curzio breaks down and explains what’s really moving markets, or something like that. Greetings, I am Daniel Creech. Have no fear everyone, this is a transitory change up to start the year. We’re just having some fun turning the tables.

I, Daniel Creech, am behind the controls, behind the mic today, because the one and only Frank Curzio is out west in Las Vegas partying and having fun. Just kidding, he will have fun, but he is attending the Consumer Electronics Show, the CES, and he attended the keynote speech, the kickoff from NVIDIA CEO Jensen Hung, or hung, or I butcher that. Jensen, CEO of NVIDIA, and Frank and I caught up yesterday and he’s going to recap and explain what an amazing speech this was. And prepare yourself because what we’ve already seen in the last couple years and the momentum and strength in this AI industry and growth trend what Frank’s going to say, you even shocked me a little bit and it’s just unbelievable to see the evolution of this and the growth of this amazing trend, and what’s in front of us. And we’re still in the early innings of this. So let’s get to that incredible conversation with Frank Curzio right now. Frank Curzio joining us from Las Vegas. How’s it going out West, Frank?

0:02:00 – Frank Curzio

It’s going good. I know how good it is you interviewing me, man. What’s going on? It’s weird.

0:02:04 – Daniel Creech

Well, don’t worry, I lied in the intro and said we’re turning the tables completely around 2025. You warned about changes. I’m just kidding. This is actually transitory. We’re actually truthful about transitory here.

0:02:15 – Frank Curzio

You know it’s fun doing interviews, Daniel, because now you’re going to realize like sometimes you got to. You know, shut me up when I’m going too long and be like oh okay, Frank so let’s move on here.

0:02:24 – Daniel Creech

Yeah, and quick programming. Note I’m behind the controls. So all of you looking and watching at our YouTube page and such know that it’s all my fault if things don’t go smoothly. But, Frank, how is the CES? You’re going on out there. What’s going on in Vegas, sir?

0:02:40 – Frank Curzio

It’s awesome. It’s awesome and yeah, dan, you’ll own me by having all the control, so you’re a total everything. Everything’s going well. I always say this, which caught me by surprise, so I know there was, like you know, a lot of travel and stuff going on. There was, uh, you know, in the midwest, there were storms and everything, but I flew out of charlotte and you know, from jacksville to charlotte, then charlotte to las vegas, uh, I’ve never seen more people at the airport in my life. Every single airline was packed. It was unbelievable how many people were flying.

Granted, this was Sunday night, right, and a couple of days before I had to buy clothes. Yeah, I lost weight, I also lost muscle, so, anyway, but I had to buy some new clothes to come out here and I couldn’t even get like in town center where we go, right, Daniel, I couldn’t even get like in town center where we go, right, Daniel, I couldn’t even get a spot, like I couldn’t park. There were so many people and this wasn’t just people just hanging out. Every place that I went to there were maybe four or five different stores, but you see, like you’re walking down, there’s like hundreds of stores there and everyone’s walking with bags, everybody’s buying shit. It was really incredible. And now that I’m at the CES, uh, you know when you’re registered and you do a few things on their app and everything you can get like you know a decent, you know estimation of how busy it’s going to be. And last year I told you this show really sucked. It was bad. Everyone told me they were in ai. Nobody even had data, it was just. It wasn’t a good show. This year’s going to be the most remarkable show that we’ve ever seen at CES, maybe in its history, and that history dates back many, many decades. Now everyone’s using AI, there’s going to be applications and they’re expecting. I think we’re going to hit 180,000 people and probably 4,000 companies, because even companies still registered in the last second. This place has never been busier since I’ve been coming here 12, 13 years.

It tells you something about our economy and I don’t know what. It is right, because we all think and Daniel, you and I talk about this. You know we all think okay, you’re in 2025, we’re going to crash in the market and high interest rates. I get it. You know, Daniel, we started this stuff, right, man? So I’m just telling you what I’m seeing and I don’t know, if you’re seeing the, I’ve never seen the economy this booming right now, where people are spending money. Maybe that’s because they just I mean, we forget that there was four or $5 trillion extra money after COVID injected, and maybe that money’s still floating around the system and I know it’s hurting a lot of people on a certain end, which is, you know, a lower end, and that’s not where you’re going to see the most spending occur. But I have to tell you, man, it is insane. The prices are high. I mean I’m saying a hotel, as soon as you walk, it’s 50 extra at night, which is a lot, because I’m staying in five, six days. But the economy is absolutely booming for everything that I see.

I think you know, if translation is the whole world’s predicting a market crash, right, I mean, you go on twitter, you go on cnbc oh, it’s gonna be tough for you, we’re gonna get you know what. It reminds me and reminds me of 1999. In 1998, we saw a booming market in technology for three, four years in a row. It was like, okay, now we’re at the top and everybody’s gonna crash and Nasdaq doubled. I’m not saying Nasdaq’s gonna double. I think we’re gonna have a really good year, this year it’s gonna catch a lot of people by surprise. There’s just so much money in the system.

Uh, everybody’s negative right now and every place that I look, every place, every single place, not one, not two. I’m telling you the last like two, three weeks. I want to hear from you as well. Email, Frankersresearchcom. I’ve never seen it this busy and I think when you see companies report which usually they don’t report as well, in the Q4, which gets reported, you know, in probably you know a few weeks, I think you see a lot of companies blow out the numbers because every store that I see is just packed, everybody’s packed, everyone’s doing business. Everything’s crazy right now. It’s insane.

0:06:08 – Daniel Creech

Yeah, the airlines kick off earnings later this week. I believe Everything is about to start on that. That’ll be interesting. No-transcript, know you? Just you just flew out there and so you know we’re recording this. You haven’t seen a lot yet. I know you tweeted a little bit about NVIDIA CEO speech, but has anything surprised you so far?

0:06:45 – Frank Curzio

The biggest surprise I’ve ever seen in my freaking life is this I went to go see Justin Long’s presentation. I knew it was going to be crazy. I knew there was going to be a lot of people there. It was at the man, it was at Mandalay Bay, there was it’s. It’s an arena that holds 12,000, the Global Ultra Arena. There’s 12,000 people in there and I thought it was for media, because I’m down here, I have a media badge and Monday, Tuesday, even a little bit of Sunday night, but Monday, Tuesday, media. We have access to certain things, certain areas. We can see a lot of products early and stuff like that. But the conference officially opens on Wednesday when you can go into Las Vegas Convention Center and also into the Venetian right. Those are the two main areas. I don’t know three or four different venues. I have smaller stuff in it. I went to this thing and apparently I guess it wasn’t just limited to media. There must have been another 25 to 30,000 people, right To the point where I went to go to the end of the line and I have it on tape.

But I hate freaking Twitter. I said I’m broadcasting on Twitter. I should have broadcasted someplace else because I know you have the character limit and you can do a little bit more, but the videos are really pain in the ass. It takes a long time to post them and my video won’t post right now. So you have to download and it’s a pain in the ass because I right. So you know, my job is to consume everything I can and get it out to everyone, and this isn’t the best platform to do that. I can’t get this video.

It’s four, four, over four minutes of me walking to try to get to the back of the line. Think about walking and you’re trying to see where the line ends. Okay, now it’s like two, three wide and I’m walking through the hallways and I just keep for four. I taped it. I had to tape it for four minutes. I didn’t get to the end of the line. I couldn’t see it. So what I did is I turned around after walking. I said let me start taping and walk back. I couldn’t find the end of the line and the time I walked all the way back to the front, it was over four minutes of me walking, going. Holy shit, I’ve never seen a lot like that in my life, right. So now I get to the front and I did something which I should never do and I know my subscribers are going to be ecstatic about it, but I know I’m not sick. I’ll play on marriage, but I completely cut the line. I cut off 25,000 people, right. So I snuck into the line, got a couple of dirty stairs because a couple people weren’t moving and I was literally probably one of the last people to get in and I didn’t. Nobody knew it, right. So I get in and I just walked four minutes of people. All those people didn’t freaking get in. They must’ve been freaking pissed because they were there for like hours. Right, I get in this venue and I have you see the crowd. For those of you that think the AI trend is over or it’s topping, I’m telling you you’re out of your fucking mind. You’re going to lose a ton of money because I’ve never seen anything like this. And these are all engineers, these are all people from other countries. There’s like a hundred countries that get represented here. I’ve never seen so many people involved in this in my life.

And when he took the stage and some of the things that he was saying, first of all, he’s a fantastic speaker, he’s great, he’s funny. I mean it’s Michelob Ultra Stadium. He’s like how is that possible? He’s like this is Michelob Ultra Stadium. He’s like that’s me showing up and I don’t have any chips available. He’s like what’s going on? And he’s charismatic and he was showing off some things. And I just want to highlight some of these things here because it’s really insane.

He’s talking about and you need to understand this okay model. It’s developed over several generations how you scale. So you pay a certain amount of money and after that it’s how much can you scale? You make your money back. Then you have scale. Say if you have an iPhone or if you have smartphones. It’s scalable, but there’s a limit to the scale. There’s a limit to the scale because there’s a certain amount of people in every country. If everybody has a cell phone same with PCs, same with a lot of things.

This is one trend. That’s it’s redefining the metrics of scaling, because nobody could see the end of it. And to get a better understanding of this, Daniel, it’s the scaling laws that have been whatever if it’s scientists, economists or whatever. They’re based on training, data and computing power right. And now that you have that, that’s how you figure out the scalability of trends and because we’re seeing this move faster and faster every year. It’s redefining the scaling loss and that’s what’s catching everyone off surprise, where everyone’s like, holy, what’s going on? We’re falling behind. So NVIDIA in Jensen’s mind this is how smart this guy is. So we’re increasing data. Data on the internet is increasing by a factor of two every year. So, just to put this in perspective, you’re like, okay, it’s going to double. Okay, Think about that, because by next year, we’re going to produce more data just next year than ever has been produced in the internet in history, just next year. That’s how fast it’s moving.

So what they did is they created. They create these great chips, the GPUs, but it’s now. They’re putting these systems together, right, and when you look at a system that he builds, called Grace Blackwell, please pay attention to this because it’s going to be it can make you a millionaire, like in six months, if you really understand it. This is the super systems that the hyperscalers are buying, buying, right, you put all these chips together it’s multi-chips, right, and you put them all together. You operate a system. Right, you build these systems, this system that they just released. That’s built, that’s now. It’s over 2,500 cores, it’s one and a half tons, 600,000 parts. They it’s built something in like 45 different factories. So when hyperscalers buy the grace blackwell, the whole entire system, they take it apart and then they bring it there through separate trucks, separate outlets and they rebuild it for them on site.

So when it comes to the transistor part, okay, and I don’t want to get too technical here, but this is important so transistors are used to process data and power. So you always want transistors to increase and increase and increase as much as you can. Right, and I wrote some of this stuff down because Taiwan Semi we all know we had a recommendation a while ago right, they predicted six months ago that multi-chiplet GPUs you put these systems together they’re going to have more than 1 trillion transistors. Put this in perspective AMD their multi-chiplets have hundreds of billions of transistors. Okay, Taiwan Semi TSMC said that six months ago that this is going to build up to 1 trillion transistors.

Nvidia just released this Grace Blackwell and it has the multi-chip lift. Nvidia has 130 trillion transistors 130 trillion. Taiwan, who makes this predicted six months ago that we’re going to get to a trillion. This is how fast we’re moving. We’ve never seen anything like this in our lives.

Ok, so people who say well, ai. They don’t understand. You just saw the news that Microsoft is going to spend $80 billion, right, capex, data centers and all that stuff. $80 billion, $80 billion. You don’t understand how much $80 billion is okay. Now, if you look at the Grace Blackwell okay, and this new chip, it improves performance by a factor of four. It also performance right per dollar. It improves it by a factor of three. What does that mean? Most people would be lucky to spend $100 million. Maybe, if you’re a bigger company, $1 billion, right. So if you’re spending $1 billion on every other chip outside of NVIDIA, okay, you’re spending $1 billion. You’re getting $1 billion back, right, maybe a little bit more. Whatever what they’re saying, when they’re saying the performance at a dollar, it’s increased by a factor of three and improves performance by a factor of four. Microsoft is spending $80 billion and getting $240 billion in a return on their investment.

So when you think about this and why is it important? You’ve got Microsoft, you’ve got Google, you’ve got Amazon, you’ve got Meta, you’ve got Oracle right. You, you’ve got Microsoft, you’ve got Google, you’ve got Amazon, you’ve got Meta, you’ve got Oracle right, you’ve got the biggest hyperscalers. They need to buy the new system, because if they don’t buy the new chip and the new system, they’re going to fall behind dramatically. And if they fall behind dramatically, we’re talking about the biggest companies in the world. Most of them have trillions, even $2, $3 trillion valuations. They risk their companies. Right now, Google can risk its company because their business is based on search and AI is able to, you know, use AI for search right. Same with Microsoft. They’re not going to lose all their business lines, but they’re going to fall behind tremendously. So what NVIDIA did is AM. They didn’t even talk about the competition, because there’s no fucking competition.

0:14:43 – Daniel Creech

This guy got on stage and there was no competition.

0:14:45 – Frank Curzio

There’s no competition. They stopped doing what they’re doing right now and said we’re not doing a thing for three years. Amd still couldn’t catch up. Amd still couldn’t catch up three years. That’s how they’re light years ahead.

That’s how far of a lead they have, which is incredible. And when you hear this guy is talking, so when we look at the cancer industry we look at the cancer industry it adds $200 billion. Right, $200 billion, maybe a little bit more. You know, when you look at cancer treatments and stuff like that, right, it might be a little bit bigger. Now it was a few years ago. He talked about three or four separate industries that are going to be multi-trillion dollar industries Autonomous vehicles, AI agents. Ai agents is going to be the biggest thing that you see. It’s going to take my prediction in three years, 30% of the workforce is going to be gone.

0:15:30 – Daniel Creech

You better learn your new job. Okay, this isn’t like scaring people again.

0:15:34 – Frank Curzio

Listen, I’m going to scare the shit out of you even more, because I really am, because when I’m talking about AI agents, these are things that are going to act and do everything that you need them to do, that you ask them to do.

And it’s technology is getting. It’s so fast and so powerful. We used to have AI and you’re like, okay, build me this. And the colors were different. It’s AI learning off of AI learning off of AI. It’s machines learning from each other and there’s no limit to how fast this is. That it’s like you know super fast speeds. I mean, you know it’s from Chad Chippity. You could say you know, give me a summary of a book, three paragraphs or whatever and it gives it to you in 0.1 seconds Times. That where another computer is learning off another computer, learning off another computer and using AI.

It’s really crazy when you see the capabilities in every single industry that’s going to disrupt. And if you use common sense, please use common sense, because I know people think I’m trying to scam. I’m not okay. If I had seven or eight different Frank Curzios, it would be the greatest thing ever. Anyone that has their own business and it’s a small business knows what I’m talking about, because you’re really involved. It’s hard to hire new people. It’s hard to get new talent. Imagine if you had eight people that could work just like you. That’s where we are right now. So when you have these AI agents deployed everywhere and now you don’t need to write code, right?

He was talking about 30 million software engineers. He goes they’re either going to have to use these AI agents or they’re gone. I mean, this is just software You’re looking at. Customer service departments are all going to be AI. Human resources are all going to be AI. I mean, this is going to impact so many people and you can either understand it and learn it and embrace it, but if you’re just like, ah, you know what fuck that it’s not going to impact me, you’re not going to have a job. And I mean, think about if you have someone that can operate exactly like you and do everything and know how you think, right, and you know I can get someone to build our presentation, update our presentations for Curzio Research, you know, and tokenize on T0. Okay, you know, and do all the funding, do everything. It’s automatically doing that for me. I don’t have to hire anyone, right? So when I look at the industries that he’s talking about and different industries in terms of health care and all the way around, he’s talking about, you know, llama, which was meta.

He brought up a. You know, a great example of how they’re using with advertising. He brought up Microsoft out with the pcs and right now. I know co-pilot is shit and everyone’s, but it’s going to get much, much better apple as well. So what you have is the biggest companies in the world. They’re all. They can’t fall behind. They need the fastest thing because otherwise they’re going to fall behind each other, and when they do, they all buy from one freaking company. I mean it’s brilliant. Now the thing that scares me, Daniel, is this guy is so brilliant and so far ahead and the way he is and he’s charismatic. He doesn’t. I don’t think he understands. This may be the first time that I listened to a presentation on AI and scared the shit out of me. Like this is like and this is like and the world shit, because he’s like AI is going to be learning off.

Ai is going to be learning off AI, and I heard who was the CEO of Google. Please listen to that, because he’s like when we get to, what is it, you know, when humans age, whatever it is, it’s when humans, when computers are able to act exactly like humans. This was 10 years out, like two years ago.

0:18:39 – Daniel Creech

You’re talking about his comment about pulling the plug, right?

0:18:43 – Frank Curzio

Pulling the plug, but even like how computers are going to act like humans, that’s happening. That’s 2025. It’s happening this year, okay. Where computers are going to be capable, we’re going to see that c, yes, this year. Okay, that’s what I’m looking forward to going. I mean, this is last year. Everyone told me how much they’re into ai. They don’t even own the data.

0:18:56 – Daniel Creech

Everyone’s full of right oh, hey, I look at this I mean data.

0:19:00 – Frank Curzio

That that’s the thing we have. I mean 90 of the data on the internet. It’s not even used. But what you want to do is you can only analyze and find out how people think and see and put them in all these systems and go into the inference and predict what they’re going to do by the more data you have. We just can never analyze data. Right now. You can analyze the data. Now. We have unlimited storage with cloud. Now we have all these things overlapping each other and all the biggest companies.

I mean $80 billion Microsoft’s spending and you know that may seem like a surprise. I already knew that number, because Microsoft’s going to be the biggest vendor of pretty close to $100 billion a year over the next couple of years. That’s how much they’re spending on this trend to stay ahead of it. And pretty soon they’re going to be able to predict everything that you’re doing, everything that you’re going to do, but not only everything you’re going to do. They’re going to be able to predict your outcomes, and he talked about this. So I’m in my hotel room right now and I’m going to leave. They’re going to have 20 different outcomes of where I’m going to go and be able to analyze them, and they’re going to continue to analyze each other to pick the highest percentage of what exactly I’m going to do when I go downstairs, am I?

0:19:58 – Daniel Creech

going to gamble? Am I going to go to another hotel Am?

0:19:59 – Frank Curzio

I going to go to a conference. They’re going to know absolutely everything and it’s scary. It really is scary.

0:20:06 – Daniel Creech

Well, Frank, go ahead. No, I was going to say I have some AI abilities because I think you’re going to gamble and have a Bud Light.

0:20:18 – Frank Curzio

What are my odds there? I’m going to gamble a Bud Light. Yeah, it was funny because right when we were doing this, the ladies outside are going to clean my room and she’s going to knock up the house keeping.

0:20:24 – Daniel Creech

You’re like oh, Frank, is that house keeping.

0:20:26 – Frank Curzio

I’m like I know it’s Vegas, but it’s housekeeping. It’d be troubling.

0:20:33 – Daniel Creech

And the way they said housekeeping.

0:20:34 – Frank Curzio

Yeah, you know you could really tell, but anyway, the speech was amazing, the demand was amazing. How many people want to see it? How many people are here? Because if you look at 2023, in January, what happened? The market crashed in 2022. It started coming back in November, but technology got annihilated, right. If you look at 2023 and January, what happened?

0:20:50 – Daniel Creech

The market crashed in 2022.

0:20:50 – Frank Curzio

It started coming back in November, but technology got annihilated, right? If you look at 2021, it kind of was like the. You know that was like 2022. So at the end of 2021, you know technology started rebounding and then you know we had a decent year of CES. It was okay. But the year before that, the two years before that, one was COVID, and then the next year we had another round of another strain of COVID. That kind of people canceled their trips. So we haven’t really had a good CES for a while. This CES, look at technology companies in your all-time highs. Yes, I know the market’s been pulling back a little bit here. They’re all here, all the big guys are here. Delta is at Sphere and they have a Lenny Kravitz concert afterwards that I have access to, but I’m not going to that because I have to sit through his presentation and be there two hours ahead. I mean, it’s like seven hours in total. I’d love to see Lenny Kravitz at the Sphere, which is great.

0:21:37 – Daniel Creech

But not that much.

0:21:38 – Frank Curzio

I’m really looking forward to it. Yeah, I’m really looking forward to it, Daniel. So I mean, there’s lots of things really exciting, just AI capabilities, robotics, uh. Samsung has a new tv, that a stretch tv. So, yeah, you think about 3d, how things pop out. The tv actually stretches it, so they have like a shark swimming and it stretches through the tv, like I’m like you know it’s.

0:22:00 – Daniel Creech

I have to google that, that’s interesting.

0:22:03 – Frank Curzio

It’s crazy, it’s dumb, but I’m probably gonna buy one because it was really cool, you see it. Uh, so you know I’m gonna get a really good glimpse and have an immediate pass, really else, but I’m gonna get a really good glimpse of the technology. But a lot’s gonna be robotics, a lot’s gonna be AI capabilities and it’s gonna be across every single industry. We’re talking about 4 000 companies. I used to say about 80 have no business being here. Uh, there’s a lot of companies deserve to be here. I think technology is going to be fascinating. I think everyone’s going to learn a lot. They’re learning how to analyze the data. They’re working. They’re partnering for the first time. Right, that’s how come.

Nvidia is where it is. Usually, technology companies own their shit. They hate sharing, right, it’s closed. It’s not open source, right. They’re like, oh, we’re not going to share until Apple is. We don’t share anything. We do everything on a down low. And NVIDIA is like you. We just partner with everyone, every single company, and, you know, build the system that they want personally, uh, and and work with industries.

And now I mean, you’re talking about a company right now with that stock and wherever it is 148, 150 and stuff like that’s kind of been hovering there, going a little up, a little down. Uh, I think by the end of this year that could be a five trillion dollar valuation. In video, I think it could easily be a five trillion dollar valuation. I mean mean, it’s like three and a half trillion, right, five trillion, five trillion. And I can tell you because they could charge whatever they want for these systems and these guys are going to buy, if you do, $80 billion, I mean they spend $80 billion Again data centers and stuff like that. That’s just one of them. That’s just one of them. So all of them have to spend that money to keep up.

There’s only one game in town. They own it. They have to buy these chips. They can’t start from scratch. It’s like knocking down all of Vegas to rebuild all of Vegas. So instead of you just built this beautiful hotel, okay, we want to make it better, we’ve got to build that.

So the foundation is all through NVIDIA. You can’t go anyplace else. I place else. I mean AMD will pick up the scraps and they’ll be fine and do crappier deals. I mean these guys are going to be ordering $10, $15, $20 billion in chips on their own and there’s no place else to go and if you don’t, you risk your company, you risk, you’re going to risk your market cap, you’re going to risk something that can go down 30%, 40%, 50%, because you’re just everybody else’s.

I mean, they all have cloud, right, they all have cloud services, they all advertise, they all have you know, think about, you know they kind of compete with each other. So if you’re getting a better return on investment by going to Meta instead of Amazon when it comes to advertising, you’re going to do it a million out of a million times, right, and we saw that. That’s why we saw Facebook crash, right when Meta crashed in 2022. Problems, right when they changed the algo for Apple and you know, for their store and you know you had TikTok out there and then they came out with reels and stuff like that. You know they adjusted and did fantastic, but you know those guys want to put each other out of the business. You risk going out of business if you’re not going to have the fastest, super freaking chip and that you know multi-chip platform, because they all need it, they all have the money to spend on it and that’s not going to change anytime soon for the next couple of years. I don’t see that trend breaking. I don’t see those guys stop pulling back on spending anytime soon.

And anyone who tells you otherwise, tell them. Please show me the data that you’re looking at. Don’t give me a fucking opinion. Show me the data, because I could show you $80 billion of Microsoft spending right now. I could show you that these guys $300 billion, total this year. $300 billion on this stuff. Okay, that’s factual. That’s how much they’re spending. That’s how much.

They came out publicly and said you show me a data point saying that this trend is going to end. Because show me the data. That’s what you said. If anyone’s negative on AI, tell them. Show me the data on what. Don’t give me an opinion. Show me the data and see what they show you, because basically it’s just an opinion and they’re trying to get hits for having a different opinion. But if you want to make money, definitely get into this freaking train because it’s incredible. Learn about it. You can learn about to our newsletters. It really is incredible. So I’ve never been this excited to see. As you could tell, I usually I’m like I go, you know, run around like a maniac doing a whole bunch of shit. It’s crazy. Okay, I’m trying to post a lot of stuff.

0:25:45 – Daniel Creech

It’s crazy I can tell. I can tell you’re excited and I know you’ve been disappointed, you’ve expressed that in the past but not that you’re, you know, faking or not excited, but I can tell that you’re. You’re buzzed about being out there and that’s. That’s awesome. What’s fascinating to me is that it sounds like and I know it’s factual, but just to reiterate or kind of recap real quickly here, looking back over the last couple of years and seeing the growth NVIDIA has put up, it’s hard to believe in one sense, as a human and I’ll even admit that, just listening to you, who just heard this keynote, it’s hard to me knowing what NVIDIA has done in the last couple of years and knowing from what you’ve just said how far ahead of the competition they still are. I think your comment about if they just quit doing everything right now, the competition wouldn’t have anything equal to them for a couple years maybe. I admit I can’t even fathom how impressive that is knowing from 2022 what the stock has done.

0:26:42 – Frank Curzio

So you operate your business based on your competitors a lot, right, you see what industries are like. Like you know, delta would look at America and say, okay, well, they charge you for first class. What are they doing? Okay, well, let’s do this, we’ll beat them at this. This is how we’ll get market share, you know. You look at beverages and Coca-Cola and Pepsi competing. Or McDonald’s Okay, we’re going to lower our value menu to $5.

Nvid, the competition, because there’s no competition. They didn’t. It wasn’t like, oh, and you know what, but this is going to be fast. Like like AMD comes out and they’re like, oh, well, now we can compete, now we could nvidia. They don’t waste their time. They don’t even waste their time because there’s no one. It’s like I mean, I can’t even put an analogy behind it. It’s kind of like you know, it’s like you’re the yankees and you have, you know, 500 and the dodgers say you know, you have a billion dollars to spend every year and, and you know, I have a high school team, I’m trying to compete with them. That’s, that’s the market right now. They didn’t even I was amazed.

I was like this guy’s not like there’s no talk. Oh, you know, if you compare this chip like we’re much faster than this chip he’s. He’s saying we’re four times faster than our own, and even that chip is 10 times better real number than the other chip that’s on the market, which we also own, and that one is also faster than anything that’s being produced by any competitor right now. Think about that. They’re light years behind and not catching up. And the fact that they have unlimited pricing power, that if you’re a trillion-dollar company, you need this, you need that system, you need it to build it. They’re going to ship it to you. It’s just unbelievable. It’s just autonomous car You’re just talking about. You know, just the data, the amount of data out there that you can analyze and how quick it is and how it’s getting more accurate. No-transcript them and trust issues, and I get it. But even he says like singularity, all the stuff I mean where it’s, it’s around the corner right now.

This is insane of what we’re seeing and it’s it’s fascinating and just you know, take time to learn about it, because it really is, because these AI agents as well, they’re everywhere. That’s a massive trend. Everyone’s going to be using them. But you know, and you could use them in programming, by the way, those guys. They’re not going to bitch. You’re not going to see anything going on in the office. You’re not going to see it. You know they work 24 hours, right. They don’t take lunch breaks, right. This is what the productivity increases dramatically, and they do exactly what you told them to do and they’re going to do it, and constantly do it, 24 hours a day. So that’s what a worker is competing against, and you better learn this stuff, because if you don’t, you’re going to be left behind, you’re not going to have a job and a lot of these people at CS don’t even know that they’re going to be pitching companies down.

All these guys AI they that they’re talking about technology is going to take their freaking job.

0:29:24 – Daniel Creech

Most people don’t know that. I’m not going to throw a lot of names at you here because I know you’re boots on the ground and doing stuff and it’s early into 2025. But I was looking and just doing some screens and some of these are very small market caps. So that’s another reason I’m not just going to give a list here, but I was looking at best performers of 2025 so far and some, as you can imagine, with smaller market caps, have really taken off already.

But it’s across robotics, quantum computing, anything related in the name as you always joke about with AI and such, is a red flag or could be, but drones also, but the quantum computing and also the robotics. So it’ll be interesting to hear more about what you see in terms of robotics, because we know your great videos of playing ping pong and such. But just seeing those stocks right now, I’m sure there’s a little bit of excitement and, again, some of these stocks are very small, so be careful on volume and such. But the CES is no doubt driving these robotics. I can’t wait to see some of the headlines and hear more about that. Autonomous driving stocks are doing well as such, so it sounds like you’re correct and, finally, the CES has hidden it out of the park instead, after a lackluster couple of years.

0:30:33 – Frank Curzio

Yeah, he talked about autonomous driving and we know, you know, we signed the partnership with yesterday. It was an interesting company, a company we both know, familiar. Right, we’re very familiar with it Toyota and we’re familiar with this company. Everyone’s familiar with Toyota, but Daniel and I because this was a company, five years, four years, three years ago, I saw the presentation and this is the one CEO in the auto industry out of the majors that was like you know what F you with EVs? It’s not scalable for us, it’s not going to work. We can’t compete with China, it’s just not going to work. So we’re not putting a hell of a lot of money into it. And you know what, if you look at some of the companies right now seriously some of the companies right now when you look at Ford, you look at GM, they’re like holy shit, I wish I listened. These guys just signed a deal for autonomous driving. They’d signed deals that they could see. They know it’s not bullshit. They’re not like piggybacking a trend. They’re not trying to beat Tesla. This is a company that’s going all.

Autonomous driving is going to be here pretty quickly. And again, I don’t listen. I love to drive. I think it’s crazy, I think it’s nuts, but there’s. You know, when you look at city driving, you’re looking at buses, when you’re looking at Uber, it could be seriously disrupted. Holy cow, yeah, I think from that level you know taxis and Robotex and all that stuff it’s coming. It’s going to come a lot quicker. It’s coming. It’s going to come a lot quicker. I mean, we have in certain areas, but I’m talking about like the scalability and really having this technology, we’re going to see a ton of that, a ton of that tomorrow.

I think everybody’s going to be talking about it’s massive. And even the guys that lost so much money ev. They’re going to autonomous driving. And you know who’s the winner there tesla, who’s been talking about this for 10 years. Right, everyone follows tesla. They’ve been following tesla, evs. They’re going to be following autonomous driving. Now they’re getting into robotics and robots and all this shit. They’re gonna be running around. They’re gonna charge 20 000. They can do everything for you. You know that I’m sure the auto companies might get into that like five years from now, after you know, tesla was that market too.

So, um, it really is remarkable. Follow the people that that are just innovative, that have done it before. I mean, it’s always been great. You look at tesla’s been great. You look at Palantir’s been great. You look at, you know, the big hyperscales have been great. These are the greatest companies, right. I mean just, they have thousands, tens of thousands of the greatest engineers, right.

And you have people who are analysts, who have, you know, 5000 paid subscribers going AI is fucking dead. It’s not going to be. If it was dead, you wouldn’t have, you know, Microsoft with you know, 15, 25, 30,000 of the world’s greatest engineers in the world working on AI models, building this out and selling it to everyone. You know these guys would not be. They’ll see it. They’ll see it well ahead of any analyst that’s telling you oh, you better watch out, because just follow the money and trends and I’m saying this because I made so many mistakes, guys. You know I love it because that’s where I am, where I am today. I really embrace my mistakes that I’ve made.

Follow the money. The money’s there. This isn’t like people want to compare it to 1999, last time the market’s like this. Last time we had interest rates, the market crashed. Follow the money. They’re still generating $50, $70, $90, $100 billion in free cash flow.

Some of these companies which is insane these hyperscalers and they’re spending it all on growth. Which is how do you compete, how do you innovate, how do you have a smaller company and be able to create a business and become a trillion-dollar company again, when these guys and their incubator systems and all the venture capital, now that they have that, they’re investing I mean Vidi’s investing in tons of startups. In this world it’s so hard to disrupt, because as soon as there’s a little bit of disruption I mean you talk about $3 trillion, right they’re like, oh, okay, we’ll give you $100 million. You don’t want $100 million? Okay, here’s $200 million, we’ll buy you $100 million. This is where we have your technology. It’s really insane what’s going on.

I know these levels, you feel like they can’t be sustained, but the money is still being spent. It’s still there. I’m not telling you to buy everything right now. It’s all-time high, but if you do see a pullback a little bit more, it’s going to give you a great opportunity. That’s been the case, Daniel, for the last 12 years. Every freaking pullback, every pullback was a great buying opportunity. It’s going to happen this year too. I’m going to be buying the shit out of everything. I hope the market comes down. I hope these companies come down 20%, because they’re going to go a lot, lot higher by pretty much year end, I’d say next two, three years. As far as I can forecast out, I won’t go further than that. I don’t see this growth stopping anytime soon.

0:34:39 – Daniel Creech

Well, that’s a great point because we will get a pullback opportunity. I know you can’t follow markets consistently, but you’re aware markets have pulled back a little bit this week around this news. But I agree with you. I think that this is as you report more, but the buying of the pullback is definitely going to be good, Anything, if I can switch gears. I know that was the keynote and I know that’s going to dominate AI and such. Is there anything on tokenization? Have you seen many booths? Any real world assets we like to joke about?

0:35:06 – Frank Curzio

There’s no booths yet because, yeah, I’m going to know that on Wednesday right, this is pre-conference, and tomorrow I’m going there. It’s going to be really cool. So that’s when I get, that’s when it officially opens up, right? So now you’ve seen, like, the major companies and there’s announcements and different things that they have access to the media. A couple like robotics and wheelchairs and stuff like that, and neurology, all that neural links and stuff it’s. You know, it’s a lot of really cool stuff out there, but I’m the tokenization.

I mean, he talked about the omniverse a ton. The metaverse is here. We talked about this, the term metaverse. Yeah, he talked about omniverse and the channels and all that stuff. Because now you have these AI agents, now you have people in the worlds that could do whatever and you have this open source program, which the internet was always supposed to be. Right, like, anyone can create anything, do anything. You didn’t have. You know, it wasn’t supposed to be owned by six or seven different companies which owned the whole internet, right, I mean, youtube decided to shut down millions of people that didn’t didn’t have the right agenda, right? You know, facebook did the same thing with the election. Now you see them changing. You have a change of heart not so much google but meta, but Meta right. Meta went from you know way left to more conservative than anything I’ve ever seen.

0:36:12 – Daniel Creech

Real quick, sorry, sorry. You put Dana Florida White on your board of directors. That is yeah, anyway, I’m sorry.

0:36:22 – Frank Curzio

That’s brilliant. Dana White is a great personality. He’s awesome. He’s’s the. He’s got trump’s ear, you know. And if you look at matter what they’re doing and who they hire and their marketing strategy and stuff like that and how they’re going, they’re supporting this because one it’s going to be really good for their business and that’s what they care about. And I think when it came specifically to supper, I gotta say this you know, when trump got shot, it was going fight, fight, fight. Like he came out with a post and a lot of people got pissed and he was. I think he was something like that’s one of the greatest things like I’ve ever seen like, and he was like yeah, I think he’s a huge fan of trump. I think trump’s gonna be very good for that business.

It’s stupid to fight against him because you could look, I mean look what he just did to trudeau. Trudeau’s gone, right. Yeah, terrorist says it’s like I’m out of here, but you know it’s more than that. But I mean you know you better get on board. If you’re not, you’re done right. I mean even told all the countries everyone’s worried about dollar. You know competitors at dollar goes if anyone tries to compete. You’re done. You’re not selling a thing to the greatest economy in the greatest you know country in the world.

So I mean, he’s he’s telling you that right, which is which is funny. So, uh, you better get on board. It’s very good for business, so we’re good for business to have the right politics, regardless of what they are. And we’ll see, because that may come back to bite Google in the ass, and Google’s done well for us and we’ve done very, very well. But they’re going to be broken up and they better be on the side of Trump because if they’re not, that’s going to be really rough for them. And we’ll see how that goes with that hyperscaler. Yeah.

0:37:41 – Daniel Creech

And then lastly, just because I interrupted you, so circle that back. He was talking Omniverse related to that and you were kind of explaining hey, this is going to be a growth component, Did he get? I know you don’t like the word metaverse anymore. Did he signal excitement this year or like a breakthrough in virtual reality or kind of that? Okay, Massive.

0:38:02 – Frank Curzio

So this year we’ll see something in quote unquote.

0:38:06 – Daniel Creech

Um, what am I trying to say? Uh augmented reality or uh virtual? We’ll see a big breakthrough this year, you think.

0:38:13 – Frank Curzio

Yeah, oh, it’s, it’s, yeah, we’re starting to see it already. We started to see like the past three, four months. But even the glasses there’s glasses now that I’ve been here for five years and even better, they display them. The glass that you put on and stuff, and you know they’ve never freaking worked, ever worked. They don’t. They come in to see us. I’m like, all right, let me sample them. Well, they’re not working right now. I’ll come back the next day. They’re not working right now. They don’t work this year. Not only they work, and there’s a lot of companies and they’re not bulky, they’re real glasses. You can’t even tell the difference and you could just like look at someone and I could be. I could just talk and be like, okay, uh, Creech, give me a scoop and it’s gonna, it’s gonna give you every single detail, uh, and I can just approach it and be like, hey, what’s everything that you just posted on your blog or whatever you know, in on the internet, social media channels, and be like hey, Daniel, what’s?

going on. How’s everything you know? How’s that? You know, whatever you just posted, I don’t know everything about you. I’m like, holy shit, what’s going on? You’re not gonna see it right. So these glasses, I you could be like give me directions here or what’s the quickest way to do this, or I need any information. You just ask it. You don’t have to take out your phone, you’re going to have to have your phone on you. But these glasses, right now I think you’re going to see the first case that they’re usable, that they can actually use them and they’re going to be cool.

People are going to show and you’re looking at Meta 2 is starting to sell a ton. We’re going to see them. They sold a shitload of the virtual rally classes a ton and I know because my daughter’s on that all the time and she’s like, wow, it used to be like you know 20,000. It’s like you know 3 million people on here now. I mean people. It was a very hot selling item and I think you’re going to see that really, get into the next round and do whatever they want, their own world, do whatever they want. I mean, that’s what the internet was made for and that’s going to happen, just like tokenization is going to happen. So I’m looking forward to seeing a lot of companies that do that tomorrow and, you know, follow me on Twitter. I’ll post a lot of stuff as much as I can. I’m doing a lot of stuff that I’m seeing. It should be remarkable. I’m really looking forward to it.

0:40:11 – Daniel Creech

Yeah, absolutely, we’ll keep the videos coming. Like I said, I laughed out loud seeing the uh Jensen talk. So wonderful, good stuff. Frank, all right, gamble. I got a little bit of advice for you. I can’t tell the boss what to do, but I can give you some advice. So bring back two pairs of those better glasses, because two people in our office wear glasses you and me, my friend. But yeah, you definitely have to gamble and play. I forget, I think it’s red, but play 34 if you do on the roulette wheel. That’s a good number, Frank, if you play.

0:40:39 – Frank Curzio

And if I win.

0:40:41 – Daniel Creech

Yeah, exactly See, this is the trust factor.

0:40:50 – Frank Curzio

You come back and you’re like, look at all this money I won, but it wasn’t on your number, it was on the next roll, yeah, and.

I tell that to people you wouldn’t stock it Like I gave it to them. And it goes higher, they don’t say shit. And if it goes down, they call me every day Same thing. So if I tell you, oh, you know, we lost, or whatever we want, yeah, it’s the same thing. So you know what? I’ll do that and I’ll be honest with you and I’ll let you know if you won. And if you won, I’ll share the money with you. Okay, how’s that sound perfect? Yeah, Frank said yeah, I think it’s red 34 I think is red.

0:41:14 – Daniel Creech

Yeah, yeah, so all right. Well, thanks for giving me the opportunity to turn the tables, uh, early this year. Be safe, Frank, enjoy Vegas and we’ll look forward to a great report next week from your boots on the ground trip. All right, we will look forward to hearing more of a detailed report from Frank when he returns next week, on next Wednesday. Be sure to follow him on X @FrankCurzio and email us, Frank@curzioresearch.com. I am Daniel@curzioresearch.com.

Lastly, here I just want to finish up with a couple of fun stats and perspectives to close out 2024. Let’s see, there’s a site themostimportantnews.com has this fun 44 crazy stats from 2024 that are too crazy to believe and just wild stats from 2024. And I thought when I was looking over some of this, I thought this could be a fun, teachable moment and give you some perspectives or ways I look at data and such and how to use that in the investing world. And let’s have some fun. Over 155 million votes were cast in 2024. All right, but here you go Nearly $11 billion. Pinky to the mouth, tip of the cap to Dr Evil. $11 billion nearly was spent on the 2024 election and I love this. The money, the most money ever spent on an election by a very wide margin. That’s our context. By a very wide margin.

Okay, for you retailers out there, one of our favorite words here at Curzio Research and Wall Street Unplugged the number of shoplifting incidences. Remember, the retailers refer to this shoplifting and steal or theft, as shrinkage Also a great word in Seinfeld and fun scene there. The number of shoplifting incidences per year in the United States is up 93% nearly 100%, but it’s up 93% to pre-pandemic levels. So before we started, letting everybody start steel without punishment Good idea there. All right, you’re probably asking where is some value here? And let’s get to some economics, and I want to throw out some. So I jotted down, so we got a couple here regarding the consumer. So let’s check this out. The US Census Bureau says that 37% of Americans are having trouble paying the most basic bills. Okay, now, that’s a high number. You got about 40% of people having issues with just basic bills. According to Bank of America, almost a third of all households spend more than 95% of their disposable income on necessities such as housing costs, groceries and utility bills. 37% of US cardholders have already maxed out at least one credit card. That’s 37% of cardholders nearly 40%, if we want to round out have one already maxed out. Half of all US workers make less than $43,222.81 per year.

Now, why do I say all of this and how do I say this is a learning moment and how to understand or put these data points in context. And what I want to do here and do better in 2025 is to say I want to take in more information, but I want to be much more selective on where I spend my time and what weight certain data points get, but I want to be much more selective on where I spend my time and what weight certain data points get. And the perfect example is I’ve been trying to scour over a lot of macro research and such and some of the best, if not the best, out there right now. And a quick shout out to 42 Macro and Darius Dale there and the way they chart and he explains the macro headwinds or tailwinds and why to pay attention to some of those. And what I mean by that is you want to focus on the data that matters, and I know that that’s pretty obvious. But when you see, and the reason I, oh, malfunction there, the reason we see, or what I wanted to share here is when we see these stats like 37% of Americans have trouble paying bills or basic bills or spending 95%. I’m not saying manufacturing economy. The upper third incomers or income earners of our economy and society represent about 70% of all the spending.

Again, if we’re a spending economy from these kind of data points, in my opinion is the pace or the rate of change. If you have nearly 40% of cardholders already have one maxed out. If that goes to 45% or 50% within a month or two or for a short amount of time, that’s a much bigger deal than say then, say, from now until 2030, this goes from 37%. Where was I here? 37% to say 40 over the next five or 10 years is not great, but that’s still not that pace or that rate of change is nothing to worry about and I hope that that makes sense because there’s always going to be headlines or statistics on whatever bias, argument, team color you’re on, red or blue, whatever politics, if you want to play it that way that you can always grab stuff and say, aha, this supports my idea because I can prove it with this data point and my point with that is to just make sure you understand context matters and we want to understand the environment we’re in so we don’t get swayed. We already have blinders and biases that we have to fight. We’re humans, but let’s try to make sure we’re focusing on the correct or most important stuff.

Interesting one about housing here US home prices are up more than 1000% since 1974. That’s pretty cool and let me see that one. And then back to work. Here we go An office building in Manhattan that sold for $332 million in 2006, just sold now. This was in 2024, for $8.5 million. This might be kind of a sad sign to the bottom here, because now you’re seeing in 2025, a lot of companies, from AT&T to different financial companies, are actually starting to say hey, employees, you got to come back to the office five days a week. This hybrid work from home commute one maybe twice a week A lot of that is ending in a lot of different areas. Work from home commute one maybe twice a week A lot of that is ending in a lot of different areas. We’ll see what that, if any, causes any shakeups in the unemployment or employment issue and such. But we will remain to be seen, all right. And then a couple of fun ones. For some reason watch just as a heads up for 2025. I’ll end on this and have some fun.

Don’t let the powers that be and the ones that are giving us COVID mandates and all kinds of stuff, completely ruin your diet as well. And here we are on the latter points. In crazy statistics, number 40 is according to the United Nations and take this with some salt, it would actually probably help with this there are over 2 billion people, according to the United Nations, that eat insects as part of their nominal diets right now normal diets, right now, classes or needs in economics. But we want to lower energy costs and therefore give people all over the world better ingredients, better lifestyles, more meat stuff like that. And it is being projected that the market for insect protein in the United States insect protein eating bugs, people this is trying to pick up States. Insect protein eating bugs, people this is trying to pick up will be valued at $274 billion by 2031. In six years, the market for protein insect or insect protein is going to be $274 billion. We can have some fun.

All right, I will see you guys tomorrow. I’m hosting solo tomorrow for WSU Wall Street Unplugged Premium, where I will think out loud more, discuss some energy markets, some big policies and deadlines coming up that investors must pay attention to for the volatility that I expect that we’re experiencing right now. Watch the dollar, watch yields in the short term and also give a new trading recommendation and opine on much, much more. Check that out tomorrow. Wall Street Unplugged Premium. Love me, hate me, don’t ignore me. Daniel@CurzioResearch.com. Daniel@CurzioResearch.com, you guys have a wonderful, wonderful day and we’ll see you next week. Cheers.

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