Steven Feldman: The Investment Risk Nobody Wants to Talk About

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**Steven Feldman** (1:26)
If you look at the S&P 500, 40 percent of it is in 10 companies. You are now making a very highly correlated bet in AI.
Period full stop. When that sorts out, there's going to be some pain. Owning cash and gold is both a ballast for your business, but create some option value in the instance where some of the stuff cracks.

**Maggie** (1:56)
For years, investors have benefited from what many call American exceptionalism, the idea that the US economy and markets consistently outperform the rest of the world. But is that still true? I recently sat down with Wealthion CEO Steven Feldman to discuss whether the forces that made America exceptional are beginning to shift, what that could mean for markets and how investors should be thinking about the years ahead.
A lot of concern come through about stock markets and in particular tech. I just asked someone, are we all overexposed to tech? Yes. Are we all overexposed to tech?

**Steven Feldman** (2:37)
Let's just start with math. It's always the easiest thing to defend.
If you look at the S&P 500, which is the most invested index, 40% of it is in 10 companies. Not all of those companies, tech companies, now some way, shape, or form, they're AI companies. So the majority of American money, whether it's indexed in your 401k or you're investing passively, you're now making a very highly correlated bet in AI, period, full stop.

**Maggie** (3:11)
Which explains why a lot of the people that we're talking to are concerned. What is the risk you see with that?

**Steven Feldman** (3:17)
I think we saw this week, maybe three or four business days, moonshot AI. That's risk number one. But if you wanted to paint a case that could be quite scary, is that China says, wow, the US economy is really being run in large part by investment in AI.
If we just give it away, doesn't have to be as good as Anthropic, doesn't have to be as good as Chad GBT, doesn't have to be as good as Gemini, just has to be good and free and open source.

**Maggie** (3:48)
Are we overexposed to America? Why have you put this under the banner of American exceptionalism?

**Steven Feldman** (3:53)
Well, it's almost done. There's four chapters to it, three are out or maybe third one will come out this week. You hear about this notion of American exceptionalism, and you got to be careful what YouTube lets me say. But America is quite exceptional in business creation, in innovation, in capital markets.
If you want to come to this country, you have some Moxian idea, you're going to have a big market with 340 million people. It's the richest country that's ever been created. Our consumers buy nonstop. And so, there is an opportunity to create wealth, to create success.
And that's what America has decided is exceptionalism. And it sits aside some things which are less than exceptional. I mean, from life expectancies to education, the irony of all of this is we sit here and we say, wow, we have like more than half of the stock market wealth in the world sits in one country with 5% of the population. On the other hand, we have 10% illiteracy rates, and we have 40% of Americans can read to a sixth grade level. So, something is failing. Something is in the middle of this. And I think the same thing that's making us exceptional is making us a little bit less than exceptional. Why we can't be exceptional in more than one thing.