Speaker · Updated
Jake Taylor: latest market views
Farnam Street Investments / The Acquirers Podcast
Summary
Jake Taylor is a value investor and co-host of The Acquirers Podcast, known for his work with Farnam Street Investments and as author of 'The Rebel Allocator'.
Chorus has 9 views from Jake Taylor across 4 episodes on The Acquirers Podcast since October 1, 2026. Their latest calls: bullish on Waymo.
Where they stand
Their latest bullish or bearish call on each company.
- WaymoBullish ·
What they talk about most
The latest views
Newest first. Every quote is checked against the episode's transcript.
AI self-improvement will be limited to domains like coding and math that give fast feedback.
Taylor responds to the idea that OpenAI and Anthropic are using machines to build better machines, which could mean a singularity. He argues that self-improvement needs a feedback loop so the system can tell when it is getting better or worse. Coding and some obscure math problems provide that loop, so the system will keep pushing there by brute force. Much of the world does not give that feedback easily, and he is not sure you can get purchase on problem sets outside those domains. He treats this as a constraint on how far self-improvement can go.
“you kinda need the feedback loop so that the machine knows when it's getting better or getting worse ... there's so much of the world that doesn't really give you the feedback loop very easily.”at 2:26
Technology like personalized medicine, not government reform, is the realistic route to cutting US health costs.
Taylor says the US spends about 20% of GDP on health care for outcomes that are reasonable but not good per dollar, and other countries get similar results for about half the spend. He doubts government reform because of entrenched interests and powerful lobbies. He sees new technology, such as personalized medicine that is better and cheaper to administer and becomes the new standard of care, as the only real hope.
“But from the technology side, if we can just, like, chip away at it and be like, well, this is the new standard of care because it's so much better and it's cheaper to administer and personalized medicine can probably help a lot there”at 38:08
WaymoBullish
Waymo is doing well, with strong accidents-per-mile results in a tightly mapped city.
Taylor has ridden in a Waymo. He credits its focus on a single fully mapped city with reducing edge cases. He says statistically it seems to be doing well on accidents per mile driven. He hedges that he is unsure whether it is better than a human driver yet.
“it seems like statistically, they're doing well as far as, like, accidents per mile driven, that kind of stuff.”at 42:55
South Korea's cheapest quintile is cheaper than Japan's on book, earnings and free cash flow yield.
Citing Verdad research, he compares the cheapest valuation quintile in each market. South Korea trades at 0.65 times price to book versus 0.88 for Japan, 8 times earnings versus 12 for Japan, and an 11.3% free cash flow yield versus 6.6% for Japan. He concludes Korea is cheap, the general takeaway from the data.
“price to book of point six five versus Japan right now at 0.88. ... Price to earnings of eight times versus 12 for Japan.”at 29:23
The Acquirers Podcast: Korea’s Hidden Value: Activism, AI & Golfzon | Ryan Albert ·
AI infrastructure & data centers
AI spending now dominates the US economy, starving other construction and sectors like a Dutch disease.
He uses the Dutch disease analogy: a booming sector lifts headline numbers while starving the rest of the economy. Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta are set to spend roughly $750 billion to $1 trillion this year, mostly on data centers. Citing JPMorgan's Michael Cembalest, tech capital spending accounted for about 40% of US GDP growth through the first three quarters of last year, and 42 AI-related companies produced 66% of S&P 500 earnings growth and 78% of price return since ChatGPT launched. Real construction spending on data centers is up 64% year over year, while housing (down 10%), hospitals (down 10%), schools (down 13%) and non-data-center offices (down 14%) have all shrunk, the way Dutch manufacturing shrank after the gas discovery.
“It feels like to me and probably everyone else that that AI is this gravitational body in the American economy right now.”at 35:49
The Acquirers Podcast: Korea’s Hidden Value: Activism, AI & Golfzon | Ryan Albert ·
AI infrastructure & data centers
Data-center spending appears to be crowding out other capex, leaving non-AI investment depressed.
Jake cites construction and capex data showing schools down 13%, offices excluding data centers down 14%, and factories down 24%. He argues the data-center boom is absorbing capital, so the rest of the economy is not forming new investment. He ties this to capital cycle theory, asking where new supply is slowing and which existing assets are getting harder to replace. He hedges the point, saying the data centers 'might be' crowding out other spending.
“it seems like the data centers might be crowding out all of this other CapEx spending.”at 37:11
The Acquirers Podcast: Korea’s Hidden Value: Activism, AI & Golfzon | Ryan Albert ·
AI absorbs most venture dollars and winners keep winning; diligence is thinning as investors fear missing Anthropic.
Record US startup fundraising in the first half of the year is concentrated. Four of every five venture dollars went to AI, and 9 of every 10 dollars raised by new funds went to firms already at the front. Rounds over $50M go mostly to brand-name VCs, who syndicate and tranche rounds so each group marks the company up a week later. Secondary liquidity is also concentrated: 20 companies made up 86% of trades. At seed, the 95th-percentile valuation was about $200M against a $29M median in the same quarter, roughly seven times apart. Taylor's friends at Edition Ventures observe that diligence is thinning because of fear of missing the next Anthropic, which outweighs founder quality, technical rigor and realistic outcome size.
“There's a real perception now that diligence is thinning. There's a lot of fear of just missing the next anthropic, which outweighs, you know, measurements of maybe founder quality or technical rigor or realistic outcome size.”at 42:31
The Acquirers Podcast: Small Caps Are About to Have Their Moment | Jeff Weniger ·
US profit margins at 17% are unsustainable and partly inflated by private-stake write-ups and AI depreciation timing.
Margins hit a record 13.3% in 2021, more than twice the long-run average of about 6%. They fell in 2022 and 2023 and have now risen to 17%, which Taylor calls mind-boggling. Roughly two percentage points of that come from write-ups of private holdings flowing through income statements, which he calls low-quality earnings. He adds that circularity inflates margins: one company's AI revenue, such as Nvidia's, is another company's depreciation expense spread over ten years, so future costs are already baked in. He suspects some profitability is being pulled forward. He argues margins cannot stay at these levels indefinitely.
“But now we're at 17, which is absolutely mind boggling. ... I think it's a full two percentage points of that is from write ups of things flowing through the income statement.”at 57:32
The Acquirers Podcast: Small Caps Are About to Have Their Moment | Jeff Weniger ·
The market crash has already happened, but its damage is unevenly spread across stocks.
Taylor cites breadth data: 59% of index constituents are more than 20% below all-time highs, 41% are more than 30% below, and 17 are 50% below. He concludes the crash may already be here but is not evenly distributed. The index is held up by AI-adjacent names, while most other stocks are in a quasi bear market.
“It might be that the crash is here already. It's just not evenly distributed.”at 3:38
The Acquirers Podcast: Great Companies, Beaten-Down Stocks: Booking & Pool Corp with Jonathan Boyar ·
Shows
- The Acquirers Podcast · 4 episodes
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