I have now hosted my own show for 6 months.

The best of the best investors, fund managers, market strategists and Wall Street veterans have joined me for conversations across the first 70 episodes of Full Signal.

Being on-air every week with smart people has forced me to level up my own market knowledge.

I have learned quickly that being able to write about finance from behind a laptop in an empty room is a different skill than being able to speak to it on camera, interrogate ideas on the spot, and shape a conversation into a publish-ready show.

Full Signal is a continuation of our team’s bet that the next great financial and investing show will not emerge from CNBC, Bloomberg or Fox Business, but that it will instead be built independently on the internet.

Until recently, financial television was defined by institutions with unlimited resources and wide distribution networks.

That model worked in a world where distribution was scarce and gate-kept.

The rise of social media, though, opened the playing field to anyone with the disruptor’s instinct and a little bit of ambition.

What we’re building with Full Signal — and with Opening Bell Media more broadly — would have been impossible 15 years ago.

As someone who started my career at Business Insider, I have first-hand evidence that independent voices are becoming more trusted than legacy players precisely because they are closer to their audience and less constrained by corporate incentives.

Full Signal is still in its early days. But the audience continues to grow across platforms and viewers tell me they appreciate both the long-form and unhurried style as well as the density of “insights per minute.”

Some of my favorite recent interviews:

• Lyft CEO David Risher on the future of autonomous driving

• The world’s leading oil analyst on the Strait of Hormuz

• Ray Dalio’s former right-hand man on the biggest market risks

As many of you have heard me discuss often the last several years, I believe we are in a golden age of independent media.

Full Signal is just one example of many that confirms the ambitious disruptors now have the edge over the incumbents.

If you have been watching or listening to Full Signal, thank you.

If you want to support the show, subscribing on YouTube, and leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify genuinely helps us grow and book great guests.

I hope you are having a great Memorial Day weekend.

Talk soon,

Phil Rosen
Co-founder & CEO, Opening Bell Media
Chief market strategist, ProCap Financial

Lyft CEO David Risher still makes time to drive Lyft passengers every 6 weeks.

It only makes sense, he told me, as someone maniacally obsessed with improving the customer experience.

David — who was an early employee at both Microsoft and Amazon — joined Lyft in 2021 as a board member before stepping into the CEO role in April 2023.

Since he took over, the company has become more profitable and grown its market share against Uber, which remains the category definer in the duopoly that is the ride-sharing business.

Lyft stock, though, has fallen 32% to start the year, despite coming off its best quarter on record.

The market believes autonomous driving will eat the ride share industry’s lunch.

But the opposite is going to happen, David said, and Lyft is actually better positioned than its rival to capitalize on the AI era.

David joined me in New York City for a wide-ranging interview on Full Signal this week, riding a Citi Bike to the studio during a 92-degree afternoon.

We had a fascinating, no-nonsense conversation.

Among other topics, I pressed him on why Lyft stock has dropped 32% this year and underperformed Uber, how he sees autonomous vehicles changing the business, and whether he would entertain an acquisition offer from Google or Tesla.

This is one of the most unique conversations I have shared with someone on the show.

I hope you give it a listen — and do leave a review with you thoughts!

You can tune in on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.

I am looking forward to hearing your feedback.

Stay sharp and talk to you soon!

Phil Rosen
Co-Founder & CEO, Opening Bell Media
Chief market strategist, ProCap Financial

Good evening, my friends!

I’m writing to you from an airplane somewhere above Colorado. I’d planned to nap on this flight but I had something in my head I just had to put on paper…

I have been experimenting aggressively with AI for the last two years.

As much as it can supercharge productivity, I believe these tools risk making its users much dumber.

Rather than optimize for new skills or knowledge, AI pushes us to normalize — and so, seek out — increasingly quick fixes and low-friction outcomes.

In this sense, four of the five most-downloaded apps in Apple’s App Store effectively encourage you to bypass the difficult mental processes necessary to produce genuine understanding and independent thought.

I say this as someone who works at cutting-edge of AI and investment research.

With a team of engineers at ProCap Financial, I deploy AI agents each day to parse economic data, analyze stocks, pull SEC filings to produce robust research reports.

Our system can do all this in, quite literally, 1% of the time versus a comparable team of human analysts inside a legacy financial firm.

I am bias, but the results are remarkable.

The AI agents routinely surface investment ideas sophisticated enough to rival those from the leading investors and portfolio managers I interview on my show each week.

The technology just works.

But again, the allure of a more productive work day shrouds the risks in the tools.

While I don’t worry about mass white-collar unemployment or a Terminator-like war with the machines, I am increasingly troubled by the hijacking of our mental capacities.

I’ve also become particularly grateful that I went to college and entered the workforce before AI proliferated.

Because I’ve published thousands of articles the old-fashioned way, I entered the AI era with sufficient judgment to use AI as leverage without letting it replace the underlying thinking or skills.

Researchers at Berkeley published a new paper that found university professors have handed out 30% more A’s since ChatGPT debuted in November 2022, with a particular uptick in classes with more writing and coding.

After analyzing 500,000 grades from 2018 to 2025, they concluded that grade inflation “may also weaken human capital development if students, receiving higher grades, overestimate their mastery and underinvest in foundational skills.”

The researchers continued:

More broadly, if AI displaces skill-building tasks during learning, students may graduate with weaker capabilities in precisely the domains where AI is strongest, reinforcing a feedback loop between AI in education and AI in production that could accelerate automation and widen skill gaps in the labor market.

Indeed, competence has always been tied to friction — a lesson particularly important for young people.

But thanks to AI, producing high-quality work no longer requires the same repetition or concentration.

Now, it’s entirely possible to scale a learning curve without learning anything.

The worst part of all this, which the Berkeley researchers pointed out, is that these tools create the illusion of understanding. Fake fluency without true comprehension, included with an affordable monthly subscription to your app of choice.

Why struggle through a crappy first, second and third draft of an essay when ChatGPT can do it for you?

Why memorize anything when perfect retrieval is cheap?

It’s funny, thinking through the power of AI has made me more protective of the human parts of my work.

I still write my own financial column each day.

I still host a human-to-human interview show.

And this blog, of course, remains 100% human.

If you’ve followed my work for awhile, you know how much I value writing as a craft.

Writing teaches you how to think. It’s the one skill that’s upstream from everything else.

Without sitting to write each day, it’s plausible that I would gradually switch all my brain work from critical thinking to mere management and orchestration.

Tom Slater, an investment manager with Baillie Gifford, captured the idea in a recent essay:

Just as literacy gave us something new by repurposing something old, AI is reshaping the brain’s allocation of cognitive resources. The trade may be worth making. But right now, most people are making it without realising there is a trade at all.

I hope you don’t think I am a luddite for publishing this piece.

AI can absolutely turn you superhuman. That’s why I use it every day.

You should master it as soon as possible to unlock your time and do great work.

Just don’t turn your brain to mush in the process.

Phil Rosen,
Co-Founder & CEO, Opening Bell Media
Chief market strategist, ProCap Financial

I have some news.

It’s my first day as chief market strategist for ProCap Financial.

I’m joining Anthony Pompliano to build Wall Street’s first agentic AI research shop, ProCap Insights.

Over the last several weeks, we have been building an army of AI agents that can autonomously hunt for alpha, parse financial markets, debate one another, and produce world-class research reports and actionable trade ideas for independent investors.

All done at a fraction of the cost of traditional Wall Street firms and with just one human (yours truly) overseeing the work and providing editorial judgement.

To our knowledge, no existing human research team can generate research and investment edge at this scale and speed.

I’ll continue to run Opening Bell Daily and host my show, Full Signal, as CEO and co-founder, only now with a bit fuller of a plate. Nothing changes there.

Newsletter subscribers got the scoop before sunrise this morning, of course.

If you’ve been reading my work for a while, you know I’ve been thinking about this intersection for a long time, the intersection of fast-paced markets and cutting edge technology.

ProCap Insights is me putting that conviction into practice.

I have picked up a lot building Opening Bell Media over the last two years, and I’m ready to put those lessons to work in this new role.

What I’ve learned getting that business off the ground will propel this one forward.

Here’s what I know does not work:

• Vague macro takes or boilerplate advice is not valuable to anyone

• General “stocks to watch” lists are boring and cliche

• Readers want less information, not more of it

• Research that takes a week to produce is stale by the time it’s published

And a few things that do work:

• Specific, actionable trade ideas with clear timelines

• Speed is the best moat to building a new company, especially in the age of AI

• Independent investors and retail are more than qualified and eager to read institutional-grade work

Our first batch of free research is already live. You can go read all the available reports now at ProCapInsights.com.

Take a look and let me know what you think.

Phil Rosen
Chief Market Strategist, ProCap Financial | Co-founder of Opening Bell Media | Host of Full Signal

I haven’t had a job for two years.

That’s because it’s the two-year anniversary since launching Opening Bell Daily.

I’m in a lucky spot where each day I get to figure out both how to build a business as well as report on the most unpredictable financial markets in history.

Strangers and friends tell me my work helps them make sense of their money and how it fits into the world around them. That never feels normal. I hope it never does.

The constant context switching pushes me most.

A typical day includes back to back meetings with sponsors and prospective interview guests, filming an episode of my show, debugging the code for our portfolio-tracking software, commuting to a studio for a TV segment.

Then there are the dozens of charts I post across social media each day.

Emailing with readers around the clock. The media dinners and events I host for Journalists Club.

It’s a chaotic juggling act that I’d be sad to give up.

And all of it is anchored by the newsletter.

The act of sitting to write each day is what allows me to keep my brain in order, converse with people smarter than me, and operate a financial media company with context and depth.

The writing habit is the engine. Everything else is downstream.

I don’t know what this company or the work will look like in another two years. But I feel confident that the newsletter will still go out each morning.

Once the morning email stops, everything else will lose its punch.

Onward to year three!

Phil Rosen
Co-founder of Opening Bell Media | Host of Full Signal

P.S. If you haven’t subscribed to the newsletter or my show, Full Signal, please do!

When I moved to New York in 2021, I submitted an essay about Manhattan to a literary magazine that I had no business writing.

To my surprise — and despite my lack of published essays and actual years in Manhattan — they published the piece.

I had written a love letter to a city I did not yet know.

I described the place with both the confidence of a lifelong New Yorker and the ignorance of someone who had just arrived.

(You can read the full piece here.)

Five years later, I read it with a strange nostalgia and tenderness.

So much has changed. In more ways than one I am not the same person who authored it.

At any rate, I do in fact now feel like a New Yorker. And while I write about business and finance each day, the city has kept my literary spirit nourished nonetheless.

The mythology of New York is old enough to have real texture and weight.

Writers have always been especially susceptible to it.

Literary types come because Whitman walked these streets. Baldwin sat in its bars. Didion named its particular dread so precisely you could feel it in your chest like a cold.

They (we) come because they have read too many books set here and not enough set elsewhere, and because somewhere in them lives the half-conscious belief that proximity to greatness is the same as achievement.

I arrived with ambitions I had not yet stress-tested against reality.

The city, I had decided, would do the testing for me.

It’s true you are not special here. I got that right in 2021. But it turns out to be clarifying rather than deflating.

Everyone around you is also trying. Some are failing. Some are succeeding at things beyond imagination.

As I wrote in 2021:

“Much of the allure, I think, comes from the same romanticism of Paris or Hollywood — the promise of being a star among stars and the fear of ignoring a talent you are certain is unique to only you.

…there’s something hopeful about looking up at skyscrapers while bumping shoulders with anonymous millions. The city gives me a sense of optimism that shields me from self-doubt and brings out a certain innocence in me.”

Half a decade and a few apartments later — Upper West Side, Upper East Side, midtown — I can confirm the indifference is real.

The skyline does not adjust for new arrivals. The subway does not wait. The throng of office commuters will walk straight through you if you linger too long.

And yet something about being genuinely unimportant to a place so alive turns out to be its own form of liberation.

The city is too large and too indifferent to sustain your self-consciousness or insecurities.

That, I think, is what I was calling innocence. Not quite naivety, but the loosening that happens when the pressure of your own ambitions gets outweighed by the sheer scale of everything around you.

There’s another line from that essay that has stayed with me:

“It’s a place where anything is possible, not so much because you are capable but because the city demands capability from you.”

New York is an intensifier, not a giver. It amplifies what you bring.

Meanwhile Paris aestheticizes failure and Hollywood is organized so thoroughly around stardom that even its casualties tend to perform it.

New York has no such sentimentality.

It just keeps moving.

If you allow it, the city absorbs you into its forward motion. And even if you don’t, it swallows you up anyway.

That relentlessness is democratic in a way that is both clarifying and, with the right lighting, motivating.

Five years is not really a long time but it feels so when measured against the expectations you set as a much younger person:

“If I discover I can make it in New York City, I doubt I’ll want to try to make it anywhere else afterward.”

I have not become the writer I imagined when I moved here.

I don’t have a great American novel to my name. I haven’t written fiction in years. The only chance my name gets mentioned in the same sentence as Hemingway is if I’m spotted reading one of his paperbacks on the train.

It isn’t at all a bad thing I have become something different than expected. That is it’s own gift.

Still, reading my own words back today reminds me that I am still working to live up to the ambitions of my younger self.

Phil Rosen
Co-founder of Opening Bell Media | Host of Full Signal

As a financial reporter I’ve met or interviewed hundreds of market strategists, economists and portfolio managers. One thing I’ve learned is that while everyone is drowning in data, the best investors are the ones with the best filters.

In portfolio management — as in life — success is mostly a question of how clearly you can see.

With my newsletter and show, I contribute an unusual amount to the morass of information that hits the internet.

Since I can’t speak to the personal situations of every investor, by definition that means some of the work I’m producing is indeed “noise” to a portion of the audience.

That’s where the cold discipline of software comes in.

On Friday, our team at Opening Bell Daily launched a new AI-powered investment dashboard to better serve our Best Ideas Club members.

The goal was not to give people more information to comb, but to provide a clean, intuitive tool to help see through the fog.

Ideally, this platform contributes less to the noise and stands in as a useful filter.

Now, for each of the weekly high-conviction stock picks I write about, members can log on to the dashboard to generate charts, key takeaways and risks for various investments with a single click.

For example, this chart below covers a stock we published last August.

It’s up 114% since then.

We have countless other stock picks that have performed even better than that one.

To be sure, I’ll be the first to admit that I haven’t had to spearhead a software product before.

AI agents and YouTube tutorials made the process smoother than it would have been a year or two ago, but finalizing it for launch was nonetheless a grueling test of humility and patience.

When you’re a small and lean team, you don’t have an IT department or quality assurance wing. Just a couple people working early mornings and late nights to solve problems and squash bugs.

Now that I’m on the other side of launch, though, I can recognize that this is one of the most engaging projects I’ve worked on.

The work itself is compelling to me. But the other component here is that I’ve felt a specific kind of magic in moving from describing a problem to engineering an elegant solution for it.

This presented both a technical and creative challenge that were a world apart from the usual editorial or business decisions I make each day.

To no surprise, building a filter is far more difficult than contributing to the noise.

I’ll still be in inboxes and on screens more often than some people prefer, but I’m proud that I’m now behind something that also helps people tune me — and everything else — out when it matters most.

Talk to you soon,

Phil Rosen
Co-founder of Opening Bell Daily | Host of Full Signal

If you want to join Best Ideas Club and access our new product, send me an email (philrosen4355@gmail.com) and I will send you a private 20% off discount code reserved for readers of this blog.

I’m lucky to have said the same thing at the end of 2024 — the year I quit my job to launch a media company, won a Fulbright award and proposed to my now-wife.

All that ended up being practice for what followed.

The first half of the calendar proved to be a head-rattling sprint and juggling act between running a business and planning a wedding from across the country.

Kaytlin and I were operating with half the usual timeline and double the stakes. We had relatives flying in from faraway lands like Hong Kong, Germany and England, many of whom had never before set foot in America.

The two of us — with work schedules filled to the brim and an ill-advised commitment to hosting regular dinner parties — spent every night and weekend parsing vendor contracts, building color-coded spreadsheets and shuffling seating charts.

If it had been clear in January just how much work the wedding would require, we may have thought twice before committing to such a compressed docket.

Fortunately — if painfully — we underestimated everything except ourselves.

And once something of this scale is set in motion, only two outcomes remain: tragic abandonment or smashing success.

After marrying in July, the world suddenly opened up, a consequence of both the peace that comes with marriage and the pragmatic result of tripling my mental bandwidth and free time.

Business boomed, I launched my own show and became a regular across a handful of financial news channels.

In August, I even had the opportunity to ring the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange, which meant I got to sign the legendary wall in the stairwell leading up to the bell podium.

Every passing month further confirmed that momentum is a lagging indicator.

You only experience the wins, the adrenaline and sighs of relief when the work is already done. Progress is almost always invisible in the present moment and then glaringly obvious in retrospect.

I know if I can hold onto that lesson, I’ll be better at all the things that matter most as a professional, as a husband, and as a man.

Three lessons crystallize as I write this today.

1. Commitment expands capacity

The wedding forced a level of decisiveness that bled into everything else.

The schedule moved so fast and offered such little wiggle room that I (we) had no choice but sharpen our priorities.

Optionality fell away but I ended up doing fewer things, better. With that came less noise and a ban on second-guessing.

The intensity of that season also revealed just how elastic our work capacity can be. But we wouldn’t have known it without committing to the mammoth task of the wedding.

New bandwidth comes from self-imposed, extreme pressure.

2. Burn the boats to make progress

Similar to the above lesson, the wedding as well as several choices made in the business confirmed to me that forward motion begins at the point of no return.

Once a decision become irreversible or too expensive to unwind, everything snaps into place.

Execution is no longer tied to motivation and becomes instead a matter of necessity.

Building in an escape hatch invites procrastination and shrinks the inevitable.

3. Leverage comes from consistency

The newsletter and show — and so, the business — have worked because they shipped on a fixed cadence.

Predictability builds trust, which amplifies reach, which creates leverage.

Traction comes from showing up without negotiating mood or energy.

Nothing meaningful happened after publishing my favorite articles or episodes. The inflection points would always come later, a result of a growing library and track record.

My life improved because of choices that narrowed rather than expanded my options.

In years past I’d try to keep as many doors open as possible. But recent history has taught me the value in closing the right ones.

It seems true that the life you want will only appear when you remove every alternative.

Thank you for reading, watching and supporting my work this year.

I will work hard to make sure the best is yet to come.

Happy New Year and I’ll see you in 2026.

Phil Rosen
Co-founder, Opening Bell Daily

This episode is sponsored by Public: https://public.com/openingbell

Subscribe to Opening Bell Daily: https://www.openingbelldailynews.com/subscribe

Follow Phil on X: https://x.com/philrosenn

Follow Phil on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philrosen/

Timestamps:

0:00 - Intro

0:30 Government debt, macro outlook

3:43 - New economic regime

8:41 - K-Shaped economy

11:56 - Public & Generated Assets

13:04 - Tech-heavy economy

15:51 - AI impact on labor market

18:13 - New economy jobs

20:17 - A new investing strategy

31:08 - Index rebalancing

Disclosure: Brokerage services provided by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Investing involves risk. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. See terms of Match Program at https://public.com/disclosures/matchprogram Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

#podcast #investing #markets #macro #stocks #bitcoin #fed

This episode is sponsored by Public: https://public.com/openingbell

Subscribe to Opening Bell Daily: https://www.openingbelldailynews.com/subscribe

Follow Phil on X: https://x.com/philrosenn

Follow Phil on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philrosen/

0:00 - Intro

0:25 - Bullish on stocks

2:20 - Earnings driving stocks

4:30 - AI bubble debate

7:30 - Circular financing and OpenAI

9:00 - AI and job market

10:30 - Walmart

12:15 - AMD

14:00 - Public & Generated Assets

15:20 - DR Horton

17:25 - Quanta Services

18:55 - How to value AI stocks

21:45 - Tesla

26:00 - Crowdstrike

28:55 - Nancy’s ETF strategy

30:20 - ServiceNow

Disclosure: Brokerage services provided by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Investing involves risk. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. See terms of Match Program at https://public.com/disclosures/matchprogram Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

#podcast #investing #markets #macro #stocks #bitcoin #fed

This episode is sponsored by Public: https://public.com/openingbell

Subscribe to Opening Bell Daily: https://www.openingbelldailynews.com/subscribe

Follow Phil on X: https://x.com/philrosenn

Follow Phil on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philrosen/

0:00 - Intro

0:30 - Labor market outlook

2:50 - AI and layoffs

3:57 - AI driving new jobs, productivity

6:30 - Broad AI adoption in economy

7:15 - Youth unemployment

11:00 - Public & Generated Assets

12:07 - AI capex and GDP

15:30 - Economic vs. asset price bubble

16:55 - AI isn’t dot-com bubble

17:50 - What investors misunderstand on AI

19:16 - K-shaped economy

22:55 - Consumer spending

25:55 - Inflation and tariffs

26:55 - Affordability and consumer sentiment

28:00 - Bias of sentiment surveys

30:30 - New Fed Chair, Fed independence

33:55 - White House policy

36:48 - What economists got wrong on tariffs

Disclosure: Brokerage services provided by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Investing involves risk. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. See terms of Match Program at https://public.com/disclosures/matchprogram Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

#podcast #investing #markets #macro #stocks #bitcoin #fed

This episode is sponsored by Public: https://public.com/openingbell

Subscribe to Opening Bell Daily: https://www.openingbelldailynews.com/subscribe

Follow Phil on X: https://x.com/philrosenn

Follow Phil on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philrosen/

TIMESTAMPS: 

0:00 - Intro

0:30 - AI trade and rotation

6:19 - Magnificent 7 turned Lag 7

8:25 - Dot-com bubble parallels

12:09 - Public & Generated Assets

13:37 - Sentiment impact on prices

14:14 - Opportunities outside tech

18:14 - Macro outlook and risks

21:21 - Unstoppable bull run

23:23 - Trading through tariffs

25:30 - Federal Reserve outlook

30:52 - Inflation and consumer spending

33:01 - Stocks are not the economy

35:43 - Sectors for 2026

40:00 - Hard to be bearish

Disclosure: Brokerage services provided by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Investing involves risk. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. See terms of Match Program at https://public.com/disclosures/matchprogram Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

#podcast #investing #markets #macro #stocks #bitcoin #federalreserve

This episode is sponsored by Public: https://public.com/openingbell

Subscribe to Opening Bell Daily: https://www.openingbelldailynews.com/subscribe

Follow Phil on X: https://x.com/philrosenn

Follow Phil on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philrosen/

TIMESTAMPS: 

0:00 - Intro

Disclosure: Brokerage services provided by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Investing involves risk. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. See terms of Match Program at https://public.com/disclosures/matchprogram Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

#podcast #investing #markets #macro #stocks #bitcoin #fed

1:34 - Chip factories in Asia

3:15 - Warning to bears

5:11 - Picking AI stocks

7:16 - It's still early for AI

9:25 - Palantir

11:45 - Circular financing and risks

14:48 - Dot-com parallels

17:55 - Google

20:23 - Building views on stocks

23:37 - Dan's highest conviction picks

24:30 - Microsoft and OpenAI

27:18 - Eightco and Worldcoin

#podcast #investing #markets #macro #stocks #bitcoin #fed

On Thursday, Google unveiled a new version of its AI model Gemini, which has made waves specifically for its updated image generator, Nano Banana.

I spent an hour on it this weekend and I can confirm it is literally unbelievable.

I uploaded a selfie of a friend and me, asked it to swap in Elon Musk, and I had a new photo about 10 seconds later.

This tool is currently the worst it will ever be.

Google reported in August that Gemini had 650 million monthly users — 200 million more than what it reported in July. My guess is that this new update will usher in millions more in the coming weeks.

As more people use and therefore train the AI on their data, this thing is going to improve faster than our reptile brains can comprehend.

Its only limitation is the imagination of its users, and that might just be the part nobody is ready for.

Synthetic AI-generated content is already indistinguishable from human-created content, but the tools to generate the former are becoming cheaper and more democratized.

This extends to videos, voices, and personas, all done in minimal time and at zero marginal cost.

It’s only a matter of time (maybe it’s already happening under our noses) that we see entire organizations or newsrooms powered exclusively by AI.

This brings us to the “Dead Internet Theory.”

The idea has circulated in conspiratorial corners of the web for a decade, but it’s becoming increasingly relevant.

In simple terms, it claims that most of the internet hasn’t been human-generated for years — that bots, automation and algorithms make up almost everything we encounter online.

Here’s what Google’s new Gemini model came up with when I asked it to “create an infographic that explains Dead Internet Theory.”

Nano Banana made this in about 15 seconds.

According to the theory (which, again, predates ChatGPT), the volume of machine-made content far outpaces that of human conversation, creating the illusion of a vibrant internet community.

The people warning about this a decade ago now seem like prophets.

I texted the above photos to a handful of friends and only about one-quarter of them called them out as fake.

Everyone else was convinced I’d been at some celebrity cocktail hour.

What’s troubling is how easy, cheap and fast it was for me to create fictional photos. It would have taken me longer to physically take those selfies in real life.

The amount of content a human can produce grows linearly, manual post by manual post.

Yet AI-generated content has no human bottleneck. Its volume grows exponentially.

That will be especially true when synthetic content itself becomes capable of generating more synthetic content.

My friends and I already talk about seeing AI-generated videos on our social media feeds. If we aren’t there today, at some point there will be less human-made content on the internet than the alternative.

Once those lines cross, the texture of the internet will change.

But the AI tools will be so skilled and the content so convincing that we may not even notice.

Phil Rosen,
Co-founder of Opening Bell Daily & Host of Full Signal

Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this post, consider hitting the “like” button to help boost visibility. If the ideas resonated, I’d love to hear why — reply to this email or leave a comment below.

Subscribe to Opening Bell Daily: https://www.openingbelldailynews.com/subscribe

Follow Phil on X: https://x.com/philrosenn

Follow Phil on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philrosen/

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/MV-Y4JStuKY

TIMESTAMPS: 

0:00 - Intro

0:32 - Falling tech stocks

2:10 - Is the bubble popping?

4:40 - AI-fueled productivity

6:34 - AI circular financing

8:29 - Outdated valuation metrics

10:34 - Hidden risks in the market

13:29 - Clients navigating volatility

17:12 - Boring investments

20:36 - Bitcoin mining in 2013

25:19 - Bitcoin allocations

26:49 - New book, "Money Together"

33:12 - Follow Doug online

#podcast #investing #markets #macro #stocks #bitcoin #fed

Subscribe to Opening Bell Daily: https://www.openingbelldailynews.com/subscribe

Follow Phil on X: https://x.com/philrosenn

Follow Phil on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philrosen/

TIMESTAMPS: 

0:00 - Intro

0:27 - K-shape economy

3:21 - Investors vs. non-investors

5:36 - Wealth effect and sentiment

9:40 - Investors aren't complaining

10:45 - Consumers keep spending

14:23 - AI vs. dot-com bubble

20:52 - Valuations at dot-com levels

26:03 - AI earnings dominance

#podcast #investing #markets #macro #stocks #bitcoin #fed

Subscribe to Opening Bell Daily: https://www.openingbelldailynews.com/subscribe

Follow Phil on X: https://x.com/philrosenn

Follow Phil on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philrosen/

TIMESTAMPS: 

0:00 - Intro

0:23 - Rethinking AI trade

2:32 - Leverage and debt in AI boom

6:17 - Michael Burry, market sentiment

8:22 - Dot-com vs. AI comparisons

11:11 - Rotation out of tech?

13:47 - Hidden opportunities in market

15:29 - Private markets

18:20 - AI is still early

19:34 - AI impact on K-Shape economy

22:43 - Uncertainty in jobs

24:30 - Geopolitics in AI race

26:38 - Under-appreciated risks

#podcast #investing #markets #macro #stocks #bitcoin #fed

Subscribe to Opening Bell Daily: https://www.openingbelldailynews.com/

Follow Phil on X: https://x.com/philrosenn

Follow Phil on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philrosen/

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/vxdPVSIo_HE

TIMESTAMPS: 

0:00 - Intro

0:27 - Concentration in stock market

3:33 - Top-heavy market as 'new normal'

5:40 - AI vs. dot-com bubble

9:43 - AI driving layoffs

13:46 - White-collar recession

17:12 - How Kevin uses AI at Schwab

18:32 - Alternative job market data

21:24 - Labor market cycles

23:27 - Economists have been wrong all year

26:08 - Vibecession vs. vibepression

29:00 - K-shaped economy

33:36 - Fed rate cuts

36:13 - Where stocks go in 2026 

#podcast #investing #markets #macro #stocks #bitcoin #fed

Over the last two years I’ve realized that building a business involves an alternating pattern of narrowing and widening focus.

When we launched Opening Bell Daily in April 2024, the company was built around a single product, the flagship newsletter I write five days a week.

I poured my energy into every variable underpinning that one thing.

The writing and design, interviewing sources, building readership, sponsorships, promotional content.

I had ideas for new projects along the way, but I’m glad I stuck to the discipline of keeping the main thing, the main thing. Relentless prioritization is the only way to make something good enough to expand into a second “main thing.”

After nearly a year of iterating on that first product, it was time to build a second — our paid membership for stock picks, Best Ideas Club, which launched in February 2025.

While related to the flagship newsletter, Best Ideas Club has demanded new skills and differentiated marketing and growth strategies.

What felt like diversification was actually leverage. The skills gleaned from the first product minimized friction in the second.

Getting this up and running took less time than anticipated. It’s become a hit with readers and I love working on it.

Two lessons here:

1. Work capacity increases over time

2. Mastery of one product accelerates mastery of the next

So with both the flagship newsletter and Best Ideas Club operating smoothly, I decided we had the bandwidth to launch a third product roughly eight months after the second — Full Signal, our new show.

The third episode went live this morning. We’ll be publishing about three episodes a week.

To get the show off the ground, my team and I have had a lot of late nights and early mornings, not unlike those early weeks in 2024 launching the flagship newsletter.

That should moderate as we get into a rhythm of booking guests, prepping interviews, and rehearsing on camera.

In sum, that’s five newsletters, one research report, and three shows each week — plus the social content, marketing and business that tie it all together.

From the outside, it may sound like an overloaded plate.

But in reality, it’s my new baseline of focus, one that’s widened so slowly and incrementally that it feels like a regular workload.

Because the ramp-up has been gradual, I’ve been able to acclimate to a new sense of “normal” at every stage.

The work I’m doing today may have flattened me six months ago, but that’s the point of sustainable growth.

Each stage of focus becomes the foundation for the next. Everything compounds.

What’s impossible today becomes routine tomorrow.

Phil Rosen,
Co-founder & Editor-in-Chief, Opening Bell Daily

Be sure to subscribe to Full Signal on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this post, consider hitting the “like” button to help boost visibility. If the ideas resonated, I’d love to hear why — reply to this email or leave a comment below.