Ben's 1x1x1 - I'm Doing Some Gambling - August 7, 2026 🚀
For those of you that are new here, every week I send what I call a 1x1x1.
One thought from my week. One interesting find/tool from my week. One image from my life.
Let’s dive in 👇
Thought from the week
I’m doing some gambling
Alright y’all, I’m doing some gambling.
First and foremost: this is not investment advice.
This is entertainment.
This is me sharing what I’m thinking about and where I’m putting some of my own money.
Not a recommendation for you to sell your house, liquidate your child’s 529, and YOLO into a ticker because a guy on the internet used the phrase “full stack” with confidence.
I mostly invest in boring indexes because boring works.
But I keep a small, predefined portion of my portfolio for individual bets when I have unusually high conviction.
The last time I went meaningfully bigger on a single name was John Deere.
Longtime readers may remember the write-up: tractors, technology, food, dirt, beautiful stuff.
That one worked out well.
I haven’t felt that same level of conviction on an individual stock in a while.
Until now.
My bet is Google.
Not because it’s some secret under-the-radar company that only the sharpest minds in Silicon Valley have discovered.
You may have heard of it.
They make a little website where you can search “is this chicken still good?” at 11:47 p.m.
But as I’ve spent more time using AI tools and thinking about what feels like the next industrial revolution, Google increasingly looks like one of the best-positioned companies on the board.
Here’s the simple version.
Google owns the full stack.
It has the AI infrastructure, custom hardware, data centers, research talent, distribution, capital, and an almost comical amount of data.
Building a great AI model is hard.
Building the hardware, data centers, applications, and global distribution needed to make that model useful to billions of people is even harder.
A lot of investors are understandably skeptical of all the AI spending.
The CapEx numbers are enormous.
It’s basically a corporate version of buying a Peloton, except these companies are buying data centers and the stakes are hundreds of billions of dollars.
The obvious question is: will it pay off?
My bet: I think it will.
AI is already creating real efficiencies, and I believe we are still very early.
My guess is that over the next six months, the conversation shifts from “AI is scary and it’s going to destroy every job” toward “oh wait, this is creating businesses, jobs, productivity, and a whole bunch of economic activity.”
Both things can be true, of course.
But the economic upside is going to become much harder to ignore.
And Google has a lot of ways to win.
Search is still an incredible distribution engine.
YouTube may be even more valuable in a world overflowing with AI-generated slop, because human-made content, personalities, podcasts, education, and trusted creators become more important, not less.
When anyone can make content, attention and distribution become king.
Then there’s Android. Waymo. Cloud. Gemini, which I don’t think we’ve seen the best of yet.
And Google’s ownership stake in Anthropic (my favorite AI product company at the moment) adds another very interesting piece of upside if and when Anthropic eventually goes public.
I’m not saying Google will be perfect.
It has real risks: regulation, competition, the massive cost of AI infrastructure, and the possibility that some of these bets take longer to pay off than Wall Street would prefer.
But when I look out over the next decade, it’s hard for me to imagine a world where Google doesn’t win, and win big.
So, for the past few weeks, it’s been the individual name I’ve been buying.
Again: not investment advice. I’m not betting the farm. I’m not even betting the barn.
But I am putting some money behind a conviction.
And if I’m wrong, I’ll simply blame the algorithm.
Image from my life
First flight with the full fam!
Flights are a little more pricey these days now that Parker needs her own seat.
I love tracking how many flights the girls have been on.
So far Parker (2 years old) has done 16 flights and Avery (3 months old) has done 2 flights.
I hope that by age 18, both girls will have close to 200 each.