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Today we’re joined by an exceptional guest, Seth Levine. With 25 years of experience in venture capital, Seth Levine is the founder of a firm managing over $4 billion in assets and has invested in household names like Fitbit, Whoop, and Rover. He’s also an author, fintech entrepreneur, and a thought leader advising funds from the Middle East to Africa.
In this thought-provoking episode, Seth Levine explores the evolving landscape of capitalism and investing in the midst of global uncertainty. Drawing from his latest national bestseller “The Capital Evolution,” he provides an accessible breakdown of how capitalism is changing—and what that means for investors, entrepreneurs, and family offices alike. Through real-world examples and fresh macro perspectives, Seth Levine examines the need for a more inclusive, longer-term approach to investing and the powerful role of innovation across industries.
Seth Levine also pulls back the curtain on emerging opportunities in sectors including artificial intelligence, digital currencies, quantum computing, and energy. With firsthand insights from his advisory roles in dynamic global markets, he shares how to spot the next big trends and protect your wealth in a fast-changing world.
One of the top takeaways from this episode is Seth Levine’s advice on building true wealth through bold bets, not by playing it safe. His practical lessons on risk, portfolio construction, and sector trends offer a timely blueprint for the next generation of smart investors.
In This Episode
- The evolution and future of capitalism—why it matters for investors
- How to identify high-potential sectors like AI, quantum computing, and energy
- The impact and promise of digital currencies and stablecoins
- Strategies for building lasting wealth and managing risk
You don’t make money by being timid. And so you’ve got to be willing to take a certain amount of risk. Now, that risk will depend on your personal situation, your family situation, whatever it might be. But if you do. If you really want to generate true wealth, then you have to take a few bold bets.
Welcome back to Wealth Strategy Secrets of the Ultra Wealthy. In today’s episode, we sit down with venture capitalist Seth Levine to unpack how capitalism is evolving in real time and what that means for investors navigating today’s global uncertainty. From the rise of dynamic capitalism to emerging opportunities in AI, quantum computing, energy, and digital currencies. Seth shares a powerful macro lens on where capital is flowing next. If you want to think bigger, invest smarter, and position your portfolio for the next decade, this is a conversation you don’t want to miss. Seth, welcome to the show.
Dave, great to be here. Thank you for having me.
Yeah, it’s great to have you here. And I’ve been looking forward to this discussion, to really getting into, you know, how capitalism is actually being reshaped. We’re even in the middle of a global reset many are talking about. And I think these are really important considerations for us as entrepreneurs, as investors, and, you know, to really understand the gravity of really kind of what’s happening at a macro level so we can make those best decisions right as we’re investing in our businesses and various projects in our family offices. So why don’t we kick things off with talking a bit about your background? I know you’ve got quite an extensive journey and everything that led you into VC. So how did it all start for you? Seth?
Yeah, I love it. And I’ve got. I have several jobs. So we’ll talk about all of those. The most important of which is that I have. I’ve been in the venture industry for 25 years, including founding my own firm about 20 years ago that now manages about $4 billion. We invest both directly in companies, stuff that people have heard of, or like the consumer stuff is like Fitbit, Whoop, Rover, things like that. Although there’s a bunch of other things that are maybe a little more under the hood in technology that wouldn’t necessarily have hit the consumer markets as well.
But we also invest in other venture funds, and that was actually an offshoot of some personal investing my partners and I have been doing in venture funds. We probably had, I don’t know, 60, 70 funds in our personal portfolios. We decided, one, that got a little taxing on the balance sheet, and two, we thought we should professionalize that. So for about the last 10 years we’ve also been investing in other venture funds. Prior to that, I worked in sort of senior management at, like, a data comms company and a telecom company before that. And I started my career back in the mid-90s in New York in investment banking. So I’ve seen a bunch of different things. I also founded a fintech business based on a book I wrote a couple years ago to try to figure out how to encourage lending to mainstream entrepreneurs.
It’s a company called Good Bread, and I’m working on a new quantum initiative that hopefully we’ll have at least a second to talk about, but that’s looking at investing in quantum computing. And of course I, you know, I also have written now two books, so I do spend some time writing and talking and lecturing and things like that. And I also, I should say, advise funds around the world, but in particular, the Middle East and a couple in Africa as well. Interesting emerging markets, the Middle East especially. So I was; I spent two weeks there earlier this year. Truly got out; I mean, like flew out Sunday morning, and the bomb started falling on, like, Thursday. So I got really lucky with that timing to get out of there. But an interesting perspective having, you know, spent that two-week period in that, on that trip.
It was in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Riyadh. But just have some perspective about these regions that I think are really important for us to understand as investors, as people that are managing family offices and managing money.
Why don’t we start from a macro perspective, and let’s talk about your book? Basically, Capital Evolution is the name of your book that just came out. And tell us how you came up with what inspired you to write the book. And then for those who haven’t read it yet, can you give us a synopsis of it?
Yeah. So let’s. Let me start with the last question because I would very quickly describe the book. Appreciate you bringing it up. It’s a national bestseller. So it certainly has resonated with people. I think it’s quite timely. As it turns out, it’s a bit of a defense of capitalism.
When we started researching it maybe four years ago now, that wasn’t top of mind, but it turns out actually about 50% of people under 40 don’t think capitalism works. So it serves a purpose as being a defense of capitalism. I like to tell people I’m a capitalist, both by job title and inclination. But we talk about sort of some of the benefits of that. But it also talks about some of the faults of the capitalism that we’ve been practicing for the last 50 years, roughly speaking, neoliberalism. Although we sort of argue in the book that we’ve kind of already moved past neoliberalism and that’s led to sort of massive amounts of economic inequality and overall lower total growth across our economy. Then, frankly, at least we see what it should have been. So we feel like there’s lots of opportunity for us to think about how to make capitalism more effective for more people and create more capitalists.
Right. That’s, I think, an important goal that we have as we sort of put the book out there, and really the book came about. And we also, by the way, describe sort of the increasing power of business and CEOs, and that’s how the book came about. One of the CEOs that I work with asked me a relatively provocative question about, sort of, whether he should be speaking out on certain issues that didn’t relate to their business and whether I would accept a lower return as an investor for them. You know, basically living a set of values that I guess he would assume that he and I might agree on. And I said no. 1, I can’t, right? Like that’s not my job.
My job is to make money for my investors. And two, I actually don’t know that that’s really the trade-off, but I definitely don’t think that that’s the role of a business in our society. And so that got me thinking about this; called my. The woman that I wrote the last book with, Elizabeth McBride, and I started talking about it. We decided to talk to a few other people about it. That turned into a series of interviews that ended up including people like Jamie Dimon from JPMorgan Chase and Dan Schulman, who was at the time the head of PayPal. Now he’s the CEO of Verizon. Lisa Greenhall, who invented impact investing, is a couple of the founders of B Corp.
Hobby Lobby and Chick-fil-A and Patagonia and all sorts of different people try to come up with some perspectives on where we sit in this sort of moment in our politics, in our society. And what we ended up writing was, I hope, a pretty accessible book about where capitalism might be going. One of our observations was that most of the books on capitalism fell into two buckets. One was sort of academic and not very interesting to read and kind of hard to parse through, mostly written by, you know, professors at business schools and stuff. Like that and the other were, like, sort of personal perspectives of a CEO who had run a business and, you know, whatever, had some sort of triple bottom line perspective or something like that. And it was their personal journey to how they, you know, woke up to whatever it is that they thought they should be doing as a business. And those were interesting, I guess, but not necessarily very, very extensible. Neither seems to serve a purpose of, like, actually talking to normal people who are actually in business and who have real business backgrounds about where we might be heading and how you navigate that as a professional, as a CEO, as a head of a family office, you know, as someone in business.
So that’s what we tried to write in the book and, you know, again, it became a national bestseller. So hopefully resonated with a lot of people. But I’ve been really pleased with the feedback that we’ve gotten about it, and it certainly has served its purpose. I actually just had breakfast this morning with a relatively well-known conservative political thinker, and he and I had a whole sort of things that we agreed on, a few things we didn’t, but a lot of things we agreed on. And I love that the book actually speaks to people sort of across the political divide and across sort of society, if you will. And you know, I think for that perspective it’s turned out to be this really interesting platform.
Seth, can you give us a couple of key insights from the book?
Yeah. So what we describe in the book is that we’ve kind of gone away from this neoliberal 50 years of neoliberalism. These ideas that were outlined by Milton Friedman, most famously in 1970, wrote a. Essentially an op-ed for the New York Times. It was based on a book he had written a couple years prior to that. But we’ve kind of moved away from that, and we’re starting; we’re kind of in this messy middle. Where are we going to move to? And Elizabeth and I in the book outline sort of have a potential future. We call it “dynamic capitalism,” and it’s really been underpinned by four things.
One is a broader ownership economy. Right. We want to recognize the need to create more owners, more capitalists in our society. We think we’ve failed to do that for a whole bunch of different reasons that we talk about in the book. The second is sort of a longer-term view. Neoliberalism really encouraged companies to think month to month and quarter to quarter, and that ultimately didn’t actually serve them very well. The half-average life of a Fortune 500 company is only 20 years. So it’s not like being a neoliberal actually ended up serving them particularly well.
But I think they sort of had it in their heads they were going to be in the right, in the right 20, you know, or the right 50%. But, you know, that’s the second thing, which is a longer-term view. The third is a role for government, but a limited role for government. We talk a lot about it; there’s an entire chapter about sort of how both sides kind of have it wrong. Right. Government’s not completely the enemy, and we should, you know, have government do absolutely nothing other than, I guess, national defense. But on the flip side, government should not step in and try to solve every problem. And it’s not, not in its role, and it’s frankly not particularly effective at that.
And so we generally argue for more limited government overall, but we try to talk it through in a way that’s nuanced and realistic based on just where we are as a society. And then the last thing, which we added at the end, which we hadn’t been thinking about, but I think it’s become increasingly important, is this notion of the rule of law, right? And really market-based systems can only function if there is a set of ground rules and those rules are applied equally to everyone. And we managed to write an op-ed. We wrote a bunch of op-eds that appeared in, you know, the LA Times and the Financial Times, a couple other places, Forbes, and Fortune. But we wrote one that ended up in the New York Times about the importance of not falling down the crony capitalism rabbit hole. And we were concerned that we were moving in that direction. So we sort of added that, if you will, as a fourth pillar of dynamic capitalism.
Hopefully that’s thought-provoking for the people that are listening to this. And if that, you know, we’re skimming the surface here, but if that’s interesting, we write a lot about it. So, you know, it’s not a long book; it’s, you know, three pages but definitely worth picking up a copy.
Yeah, definitely. And so given the state of the economy right now in 2026, where we are geopolitically, and where we are with fiat currency, I mean, there are so many different dynamics at play. What is really your long-term view of capitalism from really a North American perspective as well as globally?
Well, we cannot take it for granted, right. I think I’ve become more and more aware that there are some serious problems. I got a socialist mayor of the biggest city in, you know, in the country and then the financial capital of the world. So far he’s been, as sometimes happens, governing a little bit more moderately because, you know, there’s only so much you can do, so much damage you can do. But I worry about it. Right. And so, you know, to some extent the book, this conversation is a call to people that actually care about capitalism and the market-based system and believe in our ability to continue to operate that way and to embrace it and defend it. Right. And I think that that’s something that’s really important to me now.
Ultimately I’m optimistic about it. I mean, say what you will about capitalism; it’s quite possible. It’s sort of like what Winston Churchill said about democracy. It’s the worst form of government, except for all the others. Like, I get that there are some limitations to capitalism, and obviously part of what we argue for in the book is how do we create structures within capitalism that prevent some of what’s happened over the last 50 years, where the dynamism in the United States economy and the ability for, you know, increasing their standing in life and things like that have actually, statistically speaking, gone down significantly. Right. I mean, if you look back 70 years ago, if you were born in the bottom 25th percentile of wealth, you had about a 25% chance of dying in the top 25th percentile. That’s a lot of mobility.
It’s what, I mean, we used to call the American dream; I can still call it the American dream. But the truth is today you’ve got about a 5% chance of making that leap. Right. That’s not good for a dynamic economy. But we argue for, and this is I just feel so passionate about; I just, I’m so sick of talking about and arguing about how we split the pie up and who’s going to take from whom. And I want to spend more time talking about how we grow a bigger pie, but a bigger pie that benefits everyone. Right. And unfortunately we’ve grown a bigger pie in the US, suffering from what I sometimes describe as like the Jeff Bezos walks into a bar problem, which is when Jeff Bezos walks into a bar, the average person’s a billionaire, and it doesn’t tell you anything about actually who’s in the bar.
And we do that sometimes with our economic statistics. And that’s a little bit of what’s happened. But look, I feel very visceral about this. I don’t know, Dave, your full family history. My grandfather didn’t graduate from high school. Right. I mean, he was; his parents were immigrants. He was born here actually, in Denver.
And although I didn’t grow up here, my dad did, but he left high school because he needed to make money for his family in the Depression. He ultimately joined the Navy and fought in World War II, had a very middle-class life, was a salesman, and had a bunch of jobs. But you know, here, two generations later, right? I’ve generated, like, generational wealth for my, for myself and my family, right? And it’s just like that’s what I hold on to as like the quintessential American dream. This, like, you can go. And by the way, it only took one generation. My dad has a PhD, right. So his father didn’t graduate from high school, and, you know, he went to Harvard and has a PhD, and that is what I want for every family and, you know, for all of us across our economy.
Yeah, completely agree with you, Seth. Actually, talking about my history is a funny tidbit. I literally have in my family tree two signers of the Declaration, including Oliver Wolcott, who was one of the signers of the Declaration. So history is quite important. And, you know, I bring that back to our founding fathers. And it’s really fascinating to watch them because they were all completely capitalists, right? And trying to—they all had their own businesses, every one of the founding fathers, right? And they were trying to break free, right, from England and trying to figure out better ways to, you know, to prosper, whether that was through agriculture or whatever it was that they were working on. So I think at our core fabric, right, of this country, capitalism is really powerful and was a big driving differentiator.
In fact, when you look at people who’ve immigrated to the United States even to this day, that’s one of the biggest reasons that they come here. And you look at someone like Elon Musk and what he’s been able to create through a system of capitalism. So I firmly believe that it is, as you say, a way to create, you know, the bigger piece of the pie. And I think everyone will be able to benefit from that, you know, versus going into this scarcity mode, right, where we’re all kind of, you know, fighting for all that there is. But that said, where do you believe the opportunity is right now, Seth? Right. Do you think, you know, I mean, obviously we’ve got so many major shifts, AI and tech, that you’re really at the center of; you’re probably seeing, you know, the tea leaves there every day. But there are a lot of other things. And you just mentioned the Middle East as well.
And we actually invest in energy too. And really looking at the infrastructure of energy because that’s actually being driven right. By AI and an increased need for energy sources. And we like to invest where macroeconomics. Are really core drivers. So talk to us about where you see some of the next opportunities in the next decade.
Well, I mean, we’ll start with the Middle East, just because you mentioned it. I mean, I’m very bullish on the Middle East. Right. For a lot of different reasons. And I think there are a couple of things, and I think some of this may be difficult for, I don’t know, some people, some listeners to hear. Exactly. But you know, I’m a very firm believer that we cannot view everything through an American lens. Right.
Through Americans’ eyes. And I’m not of the mind that there’s only one form of governance, for example. Right. And it’s not that I don’t understand that there are limitations to, you know, in some of these places, the style of government that they operate or sort of what that ends up leading to. But I also don’t feel like there’s only one way to do things, and that’s the American way, and that looks like an American-style democracy, et cetera. Like me. And I think that’s really important to say from the get-go because I, you know, I have a lot of friends who struggle a little bit with, you know, some of the work, for example, I’ve done in the Middle East because they, whatever, think MBS is a tyrant or whatever it is that they actually think. And I have had—fortunately for me, I have a lot of local friends in a number of these countries, and I’ve had a lot of opportunities to talk to them about what’s really going on there.
And everyone is really emphasized sort of under. Trying to understand it from the lens of a local. Right. And understand sort of what their perspectives are. And you know, I would encourage people to sort of think about that. I would say that the US won the 20th century because we won the energy war, if you will. Right. I mean, literally, oil refining was invented here.
We have the largest, some of the largest, natural gas resources and oil and gas resources anywhere in the world. The US is the largest oil- and gas-producing nation in the world. Right. That’s changed with some fracking and other technologies, and that’s what won the 20th century. Now I don’t think oil and gas will win the 21st century. I think we’re going to be in a shift away from those resources in part because they’re depleting and in part because they’re doing other sorts of things to the environment. And whether you believe in the latter part, the former thing is true, but I think we should be spending more time investing in some of these other types of resources. And what I see when I go to some of these other areas, again, particularly the Middle East, which we think of as sort of like extractive and oil-producing, et cetera, is they’re taking that money and they’re reinvesting it in other energy forms because they recognize how powerful that is.
Right. And your comment on AI is just one example of why the energy economy is so important for the next hundred years. Right. And you know, I’d love to see the US investing more in nuclear. China has 35 nuclear power plants that are in process right now. We have zero. Right. I’m not counting the Three Mile Island refurbishment.
But there is; I mean, the last time we built a nuclear power plant was three or four generations ago of nuclear power. Right. Gen 4 is much safer, much more efficient, much smaller, essentially immune to meltdown, and all sorts of things, and I’m not here just to promote nuclear, and I don’t have any investments in nuclear, by the way, I’m not like promoting my own book. But that’s a good example of something I think we should lean into. Obviously we’ve seen investments in solar. Those need to be paired with more investments in battery. Clearly Elon Musk is into both of those.
Right. They’ve got the SolarEdge company, and they do batteries, the Tesla Walls. But there are other technologies, like wave energy, you know, capturing the energy in the ocean through waves, things like that. I would love to see us spending more time investing in that because I think that ultimately we need to, one, maintain energy independence. Right. We’re in the middle of fighting, you know, a couple as we’re recording this, a couple hundred billion dollar excursion as it’s being called. But war in the middle, another one in the Middle East around energy. And we’ve spent trillions of dollars on this.
I would much rather us be one and recognize that we’re actually fairly energy independent in the U.S., so we probably don’t need to necessarily be spending money doing all these things and, two, be spending some amount of that money rather to invest in new energy sources to augment our energy independence. Probably more than you wanted to hear, but that’s kind of how I feel about it. But you know, clearly AI is this sort of amazing opportunity for people to think about investing. But there’s lots more. Right. There’s an entire new investment opportunity in space that’s being opened up in the private sector. We see it in Colorado very much because there are a lot of space companies that are based here.
And then quantum. I’m very bullish on, I obliquely referenced this, but we’re in the process of building a fund with a couple of other partners that’s going to be primarily focused on quantum investing. I think we’re a few years, three to five years from sort of usable, workable quantum computers. But there’s already quantum sensing, which, by the way, is massively important. Just one example is GPS, which essentially underpins most technologies these days. Right. Your phone can barely operate without it, and you’re sure. And can’t operate without the timing that’s enabled by GPS, for example, and your car and all sorts of things, not to mention military, defense, etc.
There are 20 satellites that orbit the globe that power the entire thing. And if we ever get into a truly kinetic war with someone who’s even remotely close to being, you know, of our power, China, Russia, etc., like that, they’re going to shoot those down, and then we’re not going to have GPS, right? Quantum happens to be in a very good position to replace that. The components of quantum computers are very unstable, which is partially what makes quantum computers so hard to build. But that instability makes them very good at measuring gravity and timing and things like that. And so we’re in the process of creating, of replacing our timing systems with quantum timing systems. And we’re also ideally going to replace our GPS system with a ground-based, much more sort of robust and spread-out and meshed quantum-based GPS. So those are just two examples of where that stuff exists now, right?
That’s happening today. And so I see those opportunities everywhere. Now there’s a flip side to quantum, which is quantum. Among the things that quantum does, it happens to be very facile. There are some things it won’t do that classical computers will continue to do, but it happens to be very good at factoring large prime numbers. And I’m going to oversimplify for a second here, but that’s what underlies essentially all of the security protocols, sort of for everything, right? I mean, it’s what secures your bank account, your computer, all of cryptocurrency, et cetera. And so, you know, we also think a little bit about what quantum-impacted industries are.
How do we think about the transition from ECI and RSA-style security to quantum-resistant security protocols that exist? But you know, we need to start work doing that work now. So I think there’s a bunch of opportunities around that as well.
Yeah, very interesting. And tell us your view on digital currencies, crypto. What, what is your perspective there?
Yeah, I’m super bullish. So I mean for starters, I love, well, I love that. I love decentralized everything, right. Like me, I like systems that don’t have choke points. There are some arguments that some cryptos effectively have replaced the federal bank choke points with some other choke points, and I think those are legitimate. But I think there’s a lot of potential in the future in that. I especially like the ability of things like USDC and stablecoins to underpin financial transactions that allow for greater transparency and fluidity in the marketplace. I had an opportunity to be on your side of the table.
It wasn’t a podcast, but I did a webinar for my college, and one of the guys that went to college actually was not a classmate of mine. He was a year or two older, but I knew him in school; he is Jeremy Allaire from Circle. And so they asked me to do a webinar with him, a fascinating opportunity to really understand. Circle is one of the, really, largest US-based stablecoin providers and at multi-million, you know, $30 billion now, a public company, an incredible success story. Jeremy is an amazing entrepreneur. This is like the third or fourth time he’s done this. This is the biggest win. But his others were significant as well.
And it was an absolutely fascinating conversation around the role that stablecoin can play across our financial system globally. And I think that that to me makes a ton of sense, and, I mean, to put it into perspective, like very clearly, anyone who’s ever waited for a wire confirmation, right, or missed a wire deadline, right, or all the stuff that happens when you’re moving money around, bought a stock, and had to wait three days for it to clear and so they knew that they had bought the stock. Like that stuff is a vestige of, like, when you had to, like, go to the stock trading window with a piece of paper, and, like, someone had to, like, write it on a ledger somewhere, and then they needed to give you the confirmation back. Right. I mean, it just makes absolutely no sense that that’s how slow things are. Right. Dave, if I wanted to send you a hundred dollars, I should be able to send that to you. And you should get it essentially instantaneously.
Right. I mean, depending on what underlying, you know, protocol you’re using, the blocks settle within, you know, seven to 30 seconds, let’s say. Right. And even if you miss a block, you know, so now it’s a minute. Right. Like, we should be able to transact on that basis. And I’m super bullish on the ability to do that.
That without the fees. Right?
Yeah, right. I mean, well, yeah, sometimes gas is too high, but yeah, without the kind of fees.
We’re talking about the kind of fees. Especially when you get into international transactions.
Yeah, 100%, absolutely. Which is, by the way, one of the things I asked Jeremy: “Hey, what’s your US usage versus foreign?” 70%. More than 70, I think, is what he said is foreign. Because people are using it for transferring money around.
Right. Did you have any of these conversations? You mentioned you interviewed Jamie Dimon for the book. So did you guys talk about, you know, digital currency at all?
You know, we didn’t in that conversation, and I regret that we didn’t because I actually have an account for a new project I’m working on, and one of my partners wants to transfer USDC into it. And their response to me at JP Morgan was, “We’re not able to accept that.” And I was like, yeah, of course. So now I’m like, “All right, do I accept that?” That’s in my account, but then transfer it over? But it’s like too much money, and I’m worried that it’s going to cause some tax thing because I end up being the go-between. And anyway, it’s just like stupid that this isn’t just ubiquitous everywhere. By the way, I was going to. And I’m sure many people listening to this have donor-advised funds, right? And I was at the end of last year because, as everyone knows, the tax law changed a bit around how the charitable contributions count.
And I wanted to give something to our DAF just so we, you know, had taken advantage of the tax, etc. And I was looking around at the assets I had, and I have a bunch of digital currency, and I thought, well, I’m going to do that. Oh my God, was it hard to get? I was, I won’t name them, but I was on a pretty mainstream, you know, banking draft platform, and just to get them to accept Bitcoin, right? Not even like some weird protocol that, you know, you hadn’t heard of. Right. Like, I truly wanted to transfer, like, Ethereum and Bitcoin over because they had appreciated, and that was you. Those are good assets to do this sort of thing with, and we were able to eventually figure it out.
But like they’re just—it just shows you the lack of speed, right? The sluggishness with which the existing banking system operates. And I love it, as someone who has always been investing in sort of the up and comers, right? Nipping at the heels of the larger incumbents. I love that we’ve got this whole ecosystem of cryptocurrency that is doing exactly that to the mainstream banking system.
Yeah, I mean, this is really potential. This could be the topic for your next book, right? Because, you know, digital, you know, central digital currency is right at the core of capitalism, right? As well as being, you know, technology-based. Right. And you know, all the utility that it has to offer from that perspective as well. So it’s really quite fascinating, and it’s going to be another interesting, you know, decade here as things start to change with all of the pressure on fiat currencies around the globe right now. Dalio.
Changing quickly, yeah, I know what Dalio would tell you: buy a bunch of gold, right? He’s, you know, and I think what we’re seeing, what’s so golden, has been interesting, right? It’s on a little bit of a run as we’re talking. And a lot of that is because there is only now one sort of safe currency, if you will, which is the US dollar. But you have a lot of central banks that want to de-dollarize a bit, right? Because they see risk mostly because of some of the sort of back and forth we’ve had. I won’t do it; I won’t jump all the way down the rabbit hole of politics here, but.
And so what do you do? You go buy gold, right? Now ultimately, I think that digital currencies should serve the same purpose to some extent Bitcoin does, although it doesn’t quite trade in this in lockstep with gold, which is, I think, an indication that it’s not quite there yet from a kind of store of assets, store of value perspective. But I mean, I think as we look ahead in the next five or 10 years, I think it’ll become more and more so.
Yeah Seth, if you could only invest in three different sectors for the next five years, what would they be?
Wow, that’s a great question. Well, one is definitely quantum because I’m going all in on that, and I believe that. Right. So quantum for sure. I think space would be another one. We can talk about that a little bit. It’s a little harder to invest in as a private investor, but there are ways. Right? Quantum, I guess, is a little; that’s the same.
There are some public quantum companies out there, mostly qubit manufacturers. Those are more like options on whether their Qubit will win. So maybe buy them in a bag. I don’t give investment advice, but if you’re thinking about it, you might consider buying them in a basket as opposed to just picking one. So those are definitely the first two. And then I would say I’m actually pretty bullish on big tech, for example. Right. I mean, I personally shifted a bunch of assets into much of the sort of Mag 7, Mag 8, and Mag 9 now because I believe they are going to capture an outsized portion of the returns of this sort of AI boom.
Right. I think they are very well positioned, and I actually won’t even. I was about to pick out a couple specific companies, but actually, the specifics don’t even matter, but I think they’re particularly well positioned. So those are, those are sort of three things, two private and one public, that I would personally be thinking about or am personally thinking about from my own investment perspective.
Interesting. You don’t think the Mag 7 are overvalued right now. You still think there’s upside potential.
So, you asked a question, and I want to be clear about why I answered it this way, Dave. So thank you for asking that. Follow up: You said, “What would you invest in?” So if I were a trader, I would care more about sort of day to day. Is it overvalued? Yeah, probably a little bit. As an investor, like, I think about a five-year time horizon. Yeah, I’m super boy, so I would make that discernment. Right. If you’re trying to make money over the next two months, it’s hard to. I would never bet against something like Nvidia or something like that just because you lose your shirt shorting it.
But I could absolutely see a world where the markets reoccurrect but over a longer time horizon. As an investor I think that they’re poised to take an outsized share.
Right. So really tech overall, big tech as a sector.
Yeah. And big tech specifically. Right. I would not; I’m not as bullish on some of these medium-sized tech businesses that have so much play at the application layer and not the platform layer. I’m much less bullish about that. And then I would say I’m—I am bullish on Anthropic. Curious about your views on this.
I am bearish on OpenAI because I think Anthropic is just one. I think they’re better trusted. I think it’s a more powerful platform. I think they have more pricing power in part because they sell more to businesses than to consumers. I actually don’t think the economics of these LLMs are working right now, especially if you include training data in the cost of goods. But I think that Anthropic is in a really good position to be able to weather that and actually increase their prices a little bit. I hate investing based on my own personal experience because I recognize I’m not the market. But I mean, I pay 200 bucks a month for our enterprise, you know, my seat on our enterprise account on Anthropic, and I mean, they could probably, you know, order, like, add a zero to that, and I would still pay it.
Right. Like they have a lot. Now maybe the average person would only pay twice or three times, but they have some real pricing power. I don’t think OpenAI has that right. And you saw the pushback when they tried to go to an advertising model. And I think that was a recognition that they don’t make money when they’re selling a $20 consumer seat. But that $20 consumer seat is not going to spend $200 a month.
Let me ask you something. If you’re earning multiple six figures, maybe even seven, do you ever feel like you’re doing all the right things but your wealth still feels fragile, like it’s dependent on the market, your taxes are still way too high, and you don’t have the level of control you actually want? Because here’s the truth. Most high-income professionals are following a wealth strategy that was never actually designed for them. It was designed for Wall Street, not for building real controllable cash-flowing wealth. And the problem is you don’t realize it until it’s cost you years, or even decades. That’s exactly why I just put together a private 25-minute masterclass called the Contrarian Wealth Blueprint, where I break down the invisible structural mistakes I see in high earners and how sophisticated investors actually build wealth differently. This is not about chasing higher returns.
It’s about building a system that gives you more control, more liquidity, and significantly better tax efficiency. If that resonates with you, go to contrarianwealthbuilder.com and reserve access. It’s quick, it’s free, and it may completely change how you look at your wealth strategy. What do you see as the top three risks right now for investors in the next five years?
Smart investors don’t just chase returns, they design systems.
I think in large part it’s geopolitical risk. Right. I think what happens is I like to put them in the basket of externalities, which is probably why I think more like an investor than a trader, because I think it’s very hard to be a trader right now when you’ve got all sorts of things that impact prices. Oil just jumped from 80 to 120. It’s been super volatile. There are ways to make money involved in very volatile markets, a lot of ways to make money in volatile markets. But as someone who’s investing in things that feel like they’re unrelated to that, you can sometimes get caught in a shock around that. So I think that’s the biggest risk ultimately to anyone as they think about putting together an investment portfolio.
And this is why you put it together as a portfolio. Right. As you think about things that will be anti-correlated to external shocks. And I think we’re going to see probably more and more of those shocks over time. Right. You know, there’s a big sort of conversation that needs to happen about China. We certainly haven’t; you know, we’re not talking about Russia anymore because we’re talking about Iran as we tape this in mid-April. But you know, there’s a lot of uncertainty there as well.
And you know, and then what we’ve been doing in the US is we’ve been wildly swinging from one sort of extreme to another. Right. And so, you know, Trump comes into office and he does a whole bunch of stuff and then Biden comes in and he undoes a bunch of stuff and redoes stuff. And then Trump comes back in, and he undoes a bunch of stuff, and he does more stuff, and it feels like the electorate just kind of keeps swinging back and forth. Right. As we sit here, you know, six, seven months before the next midterm election. Right. I expect it’ll probably swing, you know, pretty, pretty strongly back in the other direction.
And, you know, that ultimately is not good for, in my view, our society. And it’s definitely not good as an investor. And so you just got to be cognizant of that kind of stuff and put together a portfolio that can kind of survive the ups and downs.
If you could give only one piece of advice to the audience about how they could accelerate their wealth trajectory, what would it be?
I think that, and this is not intended to be the antithesis at all of what I just said. So push me on this. Like, you make money by placing, like, meaningful and real bets, right? You’ve got to be. I was going to say be bold, but I want to explain what I meant by that. Right. You don’t make money by being timid. And so you’ve got to be willing to take a certain amount of risk. Now that risk will depend on your personal situation you know, family situation, whatever it might be. But you, you can’t make money in small increments.
And I know this sort of goes against maybe this sort of going into an index fund and making money incrementally, and I believe in that for a small portion of your portfolio or some portion of your portfolio; I shouldn’t say small. It’ll depend on your personal circumstances. But if you, if you really want to generate true wealth, then you have to take a few bold bets, right? And again, I’m not suggesting that people take 80% of their portfolio and put it on red 5, right. I’m saying look at your overall portfolio and balance. It’s fine to have some of it in stuff that’s just going to increase away, and you’re going to make a nice steady return on it. And by the way, right now with Treasuries trading the way that they are, can you actually do that on a relatively risk-free basis, you know, at a decent clip, as opposed to four or five years ago when you really couldn’t make any money on a risk-free basis? But some amount of your portfolio allocation, and that could be 5% if you’re really being conservative and that could be 40% if you’re being a bit more aggressive, should be in very bold bets. Does that resonate, Dave? And I hope that doesn’t contradict what I said before.
You don’t make money by being timid, you make it by taking bold, calculated bets.
No, you’re spot on, Seth. And we talk a lot about portfolio construction, looking at the endowment models, for instance, as really kind of best practices. But I think that it is super important to really understand just from a risk perspective how much you want to allocate before you start looking at different opportunities and then just backfill into there because most people really have a lot of overconcentration risk and they haven’t really thought through it strategically. So I think you laid that out really well as well as all the other great insights you provided with us today. Really appreciate your time. And you know, I know I’ve gotten some great takeaways. I’m excited to dive into the book as well. And so if people want to check out your book or learn more about what you’re up to on the quantum side or anything, what is the best place for people to connect?
Yeah, Two places. One is thecapitalevolution.com; that’s the book, and we’ll put it in the show notes. And then the other is if you just go to my personal website, sethlevine.com, there’s a bunch of stuff on there about what I’m doing, and they can find some more information there and then find ways to connect with me. I love hearing from people with ideas, with thoughts, etc. So please treat that as an open invitation to reach out to my emails all over my websites.
Fantastic. Thanks so much for your time today, Seth.
Appreciate it, Dave. This is really fun. Thank you for having me. Thank you for doing what you do.
You bet.
Thanks for listening to this episode of Wealth Strategy Secrets. If you’d like to get a free copy of the book, go to holisticwealthstrategy.com; that’s holisticwealthstrategy.com. If you’d like to learn more about upcoming opportunities at Pantheon, please visit pantheoninvest.com; that’s pantheoninvest.com.