Innovative Industrial ($IIPR) podcast mentions
It's a very interesting market. This is why I'm starting to, at least in the back half, say we're probably entering a more choppy environment instead of a very trendy environment. Could be wrong. That's my read of it. Now, now let's go answer a YouTube question. Nautilus 49 says, I love the show. I have a question about two REITs: IIPR— this is the Innovative Industrial Properties, is the cannabis REIT— and VICI Properties. Do you think either is attractive at current prices for long-term position? I know IIPR is still dealing with tenant issues. VICI, the financials look solid to me, so I'm wondering if the recent weakness is mainly due to current entry environment, or if there are other concerns I'm missing. Okay, so on Vici, let's go look at— if you're looking at the broader entry environment saying that's going to impact the REIT sector, usually that is true. But if you actually look at the XLRE, which is the SPDR Select Real Estate Sector ETF, which is a bunch of REITs, same with IYR, Uh, it's another iShares Trust Real Estate ETF. They look very similar. Those have— those are both all below— all above the 100-day moving average in an uptrend. So higher interest rates are not hurting the sector as a whole, at least right now, very, very much. However, VICI is near a 52-week low, and to me that is because of where their properties are mainly located. That is Las Vegas. Las Vegas is struggling. Part of it is I think 30% of their tourists were Canadian. Maybe it's not that high, but I remember it was a large number. And with the kind of fight between our current administration and Canada, a lot of those Canadian tourists went overseas. They didn't— they, for vacation, they went to other countries. So that's a big part of it. Also, the Vici's part of this issue. So one of the reasons Vegas has got more expensive is because a lot of these big casino companies, they sold their properties to companies like Vici and then they leased them back. And so they got a big cash infusion, but over the long term, that raises your costs of operating. And so I think the economy of Vegas is going to continue to struggle. So I would stay away from that one.
Justin Klein · InvestTalk · Global Shipping Under Siege: How Hormuz, the Black Sea, and Red Sea Threats Hit Your Investments · 2026-08-18What changes in the post-WTO period is that, at least formally, China committed as part of its accession agreement to the WTO no longer to require technology transfer as a condition of market access. But what in fact we see is not an ending of the trading the market for technology strategy of the 1990s, but actually an evolution of that strategy. And the evolution is defined by the fact that by the mid-2000s, you have the emergence of what we now call the indigenous innovation industrial policy paradigm. This policy really puts this concept of indigenous innovation, domestically derived innovation, at the heart of China's broader innovation strategy. The goal was, how can we move beyond some of the perceived failures of the trading the market for technology strategy of the 1990s, where you had SOEs that use these policies as a form of rent-seeking, et cetera, et cetera? How can we transition from that to something where firms are actually introducing, digesting, absorbing, and re-innovating, quote unquote, on top of this foreign technology and foreign know-how? And so a lot of what we see in the 2000s and going into the 2010s is this effort to combine foreign technology transfers with much greater emphasis on domestic companies, whether state-owned or private, investing much more heavily in their own internal R&D to raise their absorptive capacity.
John Minnick · Unhedged · The Economics Show: China wanted western tech. Now, the tables have turned. · 2026-08-06Yeah, so when we went into these partnerships, I think a lot of people told us that pharma doesn't know how to use AI. These are not— it's not like a tech-forward industry and things like that. And to be honest, that hasn't really been our experience. I think that these are, again, they're very rigorous partners, very rigorous customers, right? And they're going to test every one of our claims before they start to deploy these things. But when they see the data, they go all in, right? Because pharma is an innovation industry. I think it's interesting just to think about even the whole economics of the pharma industry. If you build a product in pharma, right, like, like a drug, right, you only have exclusivity on that drug for a certain period of time, right? And you have to continue to reinvest. Eli Lilly is a trillion-dollar pharma company right now. If they don't get more blockbuster drugs, they will not be a trillion-dollar pharma company forever. And I think that forces these companies to really be on their game of adopting new technologies and deploying them and trying to stay ahead. Pharma is a very competitive arena. There's a lot of people trying to bring these drugs to patients, which by the way is great for patients, but it means that you have to be on top of your game here. And I think that means that once you're through that door and your models are working, we've seen an upscale of this adoption very quickly and people thinking about how to use the models in incredibly creative ways.
Josh · Training Data · Chai Discovery's Bitter Lesson: Drug Design Is Another Scaling Problem · 2026-08-04What changes in the post-WTO period is that, at least formally, China committed as part of its accession agreement to the WTO no longer to require technology transfer as a condition of market access. But what in fact we see is not an ending of the trading the market for technology strategy of the 1990s, but actually an evolution of that strategy. And the evolution is defined by the fact that by the mid-2000s, you have the emergence of what we now call the indigenous innovation industrial policy paradigm. This policy really puts this concept of indigenous innovation, domestically derived innovation, at the heart of China's broader innovation strategy. The goal was, how can we move beyond some of the perceived failures of the trading the market for technology strategy of the 1990s, where you had SOEs that use these policies as a form of rent-seeking, et cetera, et cetera? How can we transition from that to something where firms are actually introducing, digesting, absorbing, and re-innovating, quote unquote, on top of this foreign technology and foreign know-how? And so a lot of what we see in the 2000s and going into the 2010s is this effort to combine foreign technology transfers with much greater emphasis on domestic companies, whether state-owned or private, investing much more heavily in their own internal R&D to raise their absorptive capacity.
John Minnich · The Economics Show · China wanted western tech. Now, the tables have turned. With John Minnich · 2026-06-19to do things, but just in general, government is much more kind of in the business of European companies in ways that is, are not always transparent and are often much more about like kind of backroom deals and so forth. And I don't know if people were paying attention this weekend. So Anthropic rolled out this version of. If you've heard about Mythos, this was the one that caused the freak out because it found all the bugs and various kinds of open source software. So they rolled out like a defanged version to customers and then abruptly withdrew it because Amazon had jailbroken it and figured out how to make it do stuff it's not supposed to do. And the US government freaked out and slapped export controls on it and basically said, you cannot let any foreign national access this. And since they can't tell who's a foreign national on the Internet, no one knows you're a dog or whether you're a German dog or a French poodle. But so this was interesting because it coincided with the release of kind of scenario that I highly recommend everyone, it's written by Tom Shivers, it's called Europe 3031 AI. And it was an exact instance of what this scenario talked about, which is that Europe is starting to realize that having strangled innovative industries in the name of worker solidarity has been a really bad bet. And it wasn't visible for a long time. And now they basically can't bootstrap an AI industry for a bunch of reasons. Their labor law makes it really hard to shut down a company and therefore really risky to start one. Especially in a really disruptive field where you might easily go bankrupt and then owe your workers like two years of severance. Their capital markets are thin. Their capital markets tend to focus capital on existing companies rather than on new startups. There's a whole bunch of reasons. And so because of this, they're freaking out because America and China are basically the only players in the AI race. And they basically destroyed their tech industry in the name of solidarity. And what Bernie Sanders would like to do is that what Elizabeth Warren would like to do is that they would like the government to control everything, to make sure nothing that they don't approve of ever happens. And then when another country, unfortunately, they can't control everything, hilariously, Thomas Piketty, Joseph Stiglitz, a bunch of left wing economists basically like released a plan a couple weeks ago for a degrowth world government that was gonna like shut down growth and redistribute it from the rich world to the poor world. And this is like, this is how they think. This is what Elizabeth Warren would like. She would like a world in which not Elizabeth, Elizabeth Warren and basically all of the bureaucrats in the EU are in charge of everything. And they won't ever let anything disruptive happen because that would be bad because it would challenge the power of people like them. And it's not going to happen. The best you can do is hurt America. You can't stop this thing from happening. Knowledge is out there. It is not stoppable. All you can do is make it so that America isn't also Iran and China. And this is not just a geostrategic problem in terms of they will have better AI and therefore better military capabilities. Not even an economic problem in the way that they're manufacturing. The fact that they're so dominant in manufacturing has given them all these economic advantages. It would be a tech problem because China likes to export its censorship regimes. It has used its economic power to force, for example, movie companies to pretend that Taiwan is part of China to like erase the record of Tiananmen and a bunch of other stuff. And you can see this in their open source AI models where like, if you mention Tiananmen, it'll either freak out or say nothing happened. If you mention that Hong Kong, the Hong Kong protests, it will like say that they were all violent outside paid agitators. I am like giving hypothetical examples. I'm not giving you the actual thing it says, but it does all of that on these hot button topics. Do we want the AI of the future that's exported to the rest of the world to have Chinese authoritarian values? I don't think so. And it's not just because like, I'm kind of a red, white and blue American patriot. It's also because I think even if I were outside of America and I had to choose between our values, whatever the problems with them, and Chinese censorship and dictatorship, I would choose the open version. I would choose the open society. And the problem is we've got these politicians who don't want to choose the open society. They kind of envy China.
Megan McArdle · The Dispatch Podcast · State Corporatism on the Rise · 2026-06-16I got to say, I would say it's success that I've kind of convinced you that this could be a good gamble. Even when I looked at the company, I thought about pitching it. I kind of had an idea it wouldn't make it into the portfolio. It's also not in my personal portfolio right now. But as you said, for a calculated gamble, it does not look like it couldn't work out at all. Actually, I think that a lot of times what you have with value traps is that you buy them when they drop, I don't know, let's say 30%, but the multiple is still at 15 and you think, okay, 15 is reasonable. It's a great company. This time though, you just have so little room left for a lower multiple. Except for if you assume that in the next two or three years wix's free cash flow will drop dramatically. Currently, if you look at their financials and also the structure of their long term contracts, it looks like WIX will earn a lot of money, at least for the next two or three years. And at that point you're already at a level where you say the multiple is so low and the market capitalization is so low that they're likely on a good chunk of money before they could even go broke. But as you said, one thing that I've seen in the last year after we covered 70 companies, companies, mediocre companies, or bad companies, if they surprise you, they surprise you to the downside. So I know that I couldn't sleep well and that I would basically know, well, in two days WIX is reporting earnings, will we suddenly see a 30% decline in free cash flow because a whole lot of customers is not there anymore. Volume investing means prioritizing your downside risk, not optimizing for the upside, and investing in Wix feels like the latter. I think Wix can be a nice gamble from here, but those are not really the plays that we look for. So again, would I feel comfortable sleeping with Wix in my portfolio? Maybe as a gamble, a very, you know, small position, but beyond that, probably not. All right, let me close it for today with a quote from we're talking about wix Wells and Buffett, right? Immediately comes to your mind when we talk about wix. So we have Buffett reminding us why investing in highly innovative industries is so difficult. So he said that the key to investing is not assessing how much an industry is going to affect society or how much it will grow, but rather determining the competitive advantage of any given company and above all, the durability of that advantage. I'm sure Vibe coding will be bigger in five years than it is today, but I have absolutely no idea whether base 44 and Wix will still be involved in it. And with that, I hope this case was interesting nonetheless, and we will see you all again next week.
Daniel Manker · The Investor's Podcast (We Study Billionaires) - The Investor’s Podcast Network · TIP820: WIX: The Most Asymmetric AI Bet? w/ Daniel Mahncke & Shawn O’Malley · 2026-06-04Growth hormone, exactly right. And that's like the basis of like the genesis of biotechnology. That's the Genentech story. That is, you know, also what Genzyme did. There's sort of bi coastal war between San Francisco and Boston. That's always existed in biotechnology, which I absolutely love. I think it makes things a lot more interesting and just sort of gives a good view on the cultures that set 50 years before any of us were here. But that I think is actually maybe even a more powerful story. And you know, we built those platforms and those companies built incredible value. And then we got away from it. Then we got more to like, okay, now biotechnology is a tool. Let's get back to drug development. And capital markets skated in the 90s. When pharma companies began verticalizing and consolidating, they began pulling in, you know, even the big guys themselves. You know, Bristol Myers, Squibb, bms, that's a big pharma company. Why does it have that name? Because it used to be three companies. You talk to people who worked in the 80s and the 90s, they're like, well, I used to work for Bristol, I used to work for Myers, I worked for Myers Squad Squibb. They started pulling in and then once they pulled in, they realized they were so large that they couldn't do research anymore. So they started buying small companies. And so what did our capital markets do? They started building for that acquisition. The problem that becomes on a timeline like that though is the whole industry begins to skate where the capital at the other end of the market is pulling. And if that capital is M and A mergers and acquisitions, buy ups from big pharma, then everyone in the innovation industry is focusing on what pharma wants
Jake Becraft · The Tim Ferriss Show · #868: Tim’s Founder Kitchen — From Brainstorm to The President’s Office in Two Months (Featuring Jake Becraft, Strand Therapeutics) · 2026-06-02