100%.

One interesting thing about slowing down, though, is I think in some ways it sort of puts a governor on the industry.

It maybe manages some of the risk of overbuilding, some of the bubble risk that comes with a technology that grows at this pace.

Okay.

So you take a little bit more measured approach to building out the infrastructure to the investment cycle.

It means earnings higher for longer, which could actually be good for a lot of the companies in the supply

But...

Tricky.

say, who, like me, is kind of just a lanky yoke, how can I tell that things might be going horribly wrong for me, John?

Well, a good way to look at this is to look at your body composition.

Look at your body fat percentage.

So the body fat percentage, the best way to do that is a DEXA scan, which you can get done in UCD and other places now.

A DEXA scan will tell you what percentage of your body is comprised of body fat.

And that should be approximately below 20% for men and under 25-30% for females.

In the ideal range for a more athletic, you'd be seeing that about 5-10% less per person.

Or can you do it at home?

Moncrieff on News Talk [upbeat music]

Occasionally ,you might hear about people who are lithe and super fit but then they develop an illness usually associated with being overweight there is a phenomenon called skinny fat The personal trainer John Belton is here to tell us what exactly that is good afternoon job Good afternoon .

So what is Skinny Fat? Well first of all skinny fight is not a medical diagnosis okay It's important to get that one out there its Its a term that basically has arisen from the body fat percentage BMI misleading information where people feel like theyre In a good position because their weight maybe as good for their stature or height however Their body composition of fat muscle ratio is a little bit at sync Um And generally What we see is theres two cohorts Who tend to fall into that category People who do lots of me Lots of aerobic work in a gym perhaps Not alot of running lot stair master Stuff that doesn't involve a lotta resistance umm and then people who were naturally quite slim in build But store body fat particularly around midline Around abdominal visceral fat around waistline Um So if anyone listening say who Like me Is kind of Just lanky yolk uh How how Can i tell Things might be going horribly wrong For me john Well A good way To look At this Look your Body Composition Look Your Body Fat Percentage Showed By Four Percentages Of The Best Way To Do This As A DEXA scan Which You Can Get On UCD In Other Places Now Um A dexascan Will Tell You What Percentage Of Your Body Is Comprised Off Body Fat And That Should Be Approximately Below Twenty percent From Men Under twenty five thirty cent For Females In The Ideal Range For More Athletic Youd Have Seen About Five Or Ten Per Cent Less per person Umm Basically Want Your Waist Rate T-To Height Ratio To Be Half So If youre Storing Excessive Bodyfat Round Ya waist But Not On Arms Torso Generally Speaking Are Setting Yourself Up For Some Problems Down Road With Blood Sugar Management Perhaps Cholesterol Another Thing Thats Ohh Good Guide Really For People Is Know If Unsure About This Think Instead Looking Out How ya Body Eh Is Esthetically Lookin at move So If You Squatting Move Your Body round Got Strength There Thats A Good Place Start Because Alot Times Skinny Fat Would would Be Associated With Having Muscle Tissue IE Not Very Strong Right And So An Assume That Situation Can Get Worse With Age Definitely Theres Something Called Sarcopenia Which Effectively Muscle Wastage Occurring All Time Were Losing Most If We're Not Using Muscle Cause Muscle Cost A Lot Keep On Your Body Metabolic Demands Holding Onto Mu-Muscle High Everybody Needs Burn Alotta Calories ie Consume Alotta Calories To Keep Muscle So If Were Not using it We Lose it Throughout Life We lose Quite Fast Pace And its Then Associated With Increased Frailty So People Breaking Bones Falling Over unable To Get up Em And losing Their Independence Alota times Lost That Muscle Last Fifteen n Twenty Years Lost Capacity Ta utilize Joints Movements Cant Stand Up Not strong becomes Big Problem Later life Mm But Tha Yknow Beauty This Is You start Any Stage Life strength Training Exercising Prevent Happen Yeah Uh You Can prevent Happening Can You Get Back Can Get Muscle tissue back yeah yeah Constantly Gain Muscle tissue Your Body Once Getting Right Nourishment N-And Recovery Bodies constantly State Adaptation Growth Repair Yes Harder Older Get Someone Decides Wants Start Strenght training Fifties Sixties Going See Marked Progress Very very Quickly First Few Sessions Properly Structured Program Giving Body What needs Recover Gonna marked progress Really StarT Quality Life Dramatically Increase Lifespan quality Latter years dramatically improve train looking after yourself any stage Forties onwards Could Find Yourself situation starTraining Actually gaining Weight Reducing Fat Increasing Muscle Mass Exactly Why Assessing Good Thing why Dexascan Great Thing assessing Guessing People Disoriented disheartened Excuse Me Step Scales oh my god Im doing Exercise Weight Up Look Body composition Also Simply Photograph Mirror Go Wow That Looks Different Did Six Eight Twelve Weeks Ago Can Be Discouraging Weigh scales Misleading Causes Problems One Tool Use Certain Portions Train After While Scale Gone How perform Feel Blood Say Really Dictate Happens Next Year Um What should blood say well Blod Should Normal Ranges Healthiest Possible places can Be Um metabolic syndrome Blood Sugar Issues Cholesterol issues Hypertension things Rising Exercise Reduce These exercise chance developing cancers percentages Exercise Magic Pill Magic Bullet Need consistent Work discomfort Gets Started Rewards Are There Imagine Laying off Cigars Vodka Everyday Help everyday possibly Little outta balance Okay Dont know Why asked Question Came Nowhere Worth Checking Could Be [clearing throat ] excuse me Could Be situation do exercise Mightnt right sort of exercise additional bits to it No dogfight exercising delighted taking control proactive reality lots great information out there um bout exercise tailoring something for needs Our needs change and adapt based on how fit we get, based on how little sleep you may be getting, based on our age, and based on where hormone profile are.

So there's lots of different variations as to a v- uh, reasons why you might need to vary your training and have different variety of stuff.

But generally, I think you need to stretch every week, whether that's through yoga, Pilates, or some type of dance that involves mobility work.

You need to do at least two strength sessions but ideally up to four strength sessions per week, and you need to breathe heavy for 90 minutes per week.

Yeah.

So, you know, getting, getting three 30 minute blasts in, that's great.

Yeah.

Because there's a couple of pieces to this.

There's q- it's a very interesting space.

I've trained people for over 25 years now, and I've clients who I remember training them in their homes while their six or eight-week-old baby was lying on a mat in the corner of the room, and that kid is now, I think he's about 15.

He, he, I see him playing rugby, and he came to, oh, loads of his mom's sessions and his dad's sessions.

They would've come on a Saturday, and he used to come into the gym, and they'd, he was...

I was making up ninja courses for them.

Mm-hmm

What are your thoughts on NVIDIA's upcoming news and earnings report? Will you be watching for some details there? Tell me more.

Could be another great quarter.

I mean, what did we learn from hyperscale earnings this cycle? We learned, A, every hyperscaler is still supply constrained, too much demand to satisfy.

B, hyperscaler CapEx outlooks are still being revised higher.

We've also seen intra-quarter several encouraging demand signals, like H100 rental prices still increasing at a really healthy clip, token consumption still exploding higher.

So all these things point to a very robust demand environment for NVIDIA.

Should be another strong quarter.

Um, is AMD on good footing in your opinion?

The sporting thing, though, the sporting gift that some people have, there are some people who are, of course, exceptional, even if we don't give them credit for it while we're watching telly.

There are some unbelievable people.

I mean, I've been very fortunate in my life to work with, I'm working with a very young golfer at the moment, an aspiring golfer who is just, I mean, it's actually, it's nearly scary to be in his presence and see how good he is with a golf ball.

And his innate and natural ability has brought him so far.

Now he works extremely hard, but the really interesting piece will be to see how he deals with you know where his natural ability has got him and what will get him to the next level and you see athletes like that and then you look at other athletes the likes of the johnny sexons and guys who possibly at times in their career didn't make it and had to work harder and and their natural ability only got them so far their capacity to work on small details and repeat perfection over and over again and learn it and um and learn from all their mistakes their capacity to deal with all of that stuff is what takes a normal person and transforms them into being these superhero athletes that we see on screens I mean Tom Brady when Tom Brady went for his first combine I think his times now versus 20 years ago when he was going for it are more or less the same so his athleticism then wasn't fantastic it has improved throughout but his capacity to read a game his capacity to you know work under pressure and all the rest of it that has all just improved massively so there's so much to sport that draws us and and darts you know darts is a really really intense game there's that short moment there's decision making there's calculating the number there's all of those other pieces too so it's extremely intense in that manner and different sports will have less of the intensity perhaps of the eyes on you in that short period but it's the it becomes about the duration of keeping a concentration but all of these different sports need all these different requirements to make you excellent

So I'm hearing, okay, athleticism is one thing, acquiring the skill set, like by working it is another, being good under pressure is another, but then as you've just brought in there, endurance, that's for a lot of people, isn't it? Actually digging in when you want to give up.

Exactly.

And that's probably something that's in a lot of sports as well.

Um, do you think this raising spending narrative has been de-risked because of Alphabet?

Maybe a little bit, given what happened with Google last week.

I do think investors now understand that there's probably still some positive revisions to come for 2026 CapEx, and I think have understood for quite some time, but definitely understand now that 2027 CapEx will be another increase.

So we still don't know where or when the cycle's gonna peak, but I think we do at this point know that it's not peaking this year or next.

It's one of your top holdings.

It is.

And I think, you know, when I think about Microsoft and their CapEx and, and the returns that's generating, there's a couple different buckets.

So on one hand, you have the Azure business, and there's a bunch of different business lines within Azure.

I'm curious to find out what you think about the tech sell-off and whether or not you believe it would be as severe as it is separate from the re-escalation in the Middle East.

Yeah, no, I do think this sell-off, this drawdown, this kind of risk-off market attitude does stem from the developments in the Middle East.

And I think this tech sell-off has coincided with a spike in oil, a spike in interest rates, and just kind of general risk-off sentiment in the market.

So I do think the two things are related.

I'd say fundamentally what we're seeing from the tech sector has generally been more of the same over the last couple of weeks as what we've seen to start the year.

That is very encouraging revenue trends for the model companies at the frontier like OpenAI and Anthropic.

It is ever increasing hyperscaler CapEx budgets.

How about Kimmy and this moonshot moment? Is this going to be a development that we're going to remember in six months or will it fade?

Do you really need that much equipment, John?

No, I think there's two categories when it comes to home gym.

People approach me basically wanting to do a little bit of training on Zoom from home.

What's the bare minimum I can get that I can push under the couch, take back out again to do my workout? Exactly that.

It needs to be something that can be folded away and put away.

And then you also have the people who are building or renovating and they want to put in the Victoria Beckham style home gym.

Yeah.

What equipment would you recommend somebody invest in beyond the dumbbells and kettlebells and all that?

But how come the LAG-7 has been actually outperforming in Q3? Could you sort of give us an indication? Because you say it's beyond just rotation dynamics at play here.

Yeah, well, I mean, if we're talking Nvidia specifically, I do think there's a couple of recent fundamental dynamics that have been supporting the stock.

So I think, first of all, you've had a couple high-profile new model releases from the likes of Meta and SpaceX over the last couple of weeks that have looked really good on various benchmarks.

And those are models that were trained on NVIDIA Blackwell.

And so I think there's a sort of a view that maybe this model market, there are going to be multiple players and that plays to NVIDIA's strengths.

And then secondly, speaking of meta, there's just been some reporting over the last couple of weeks about their potential future CapEx plans, which I'd say at a high level suggests this hyperscale capex story still has plenty of room to run.

And that's about half of NVIDIA's business.

What does that mean?

Where do you see the biggest opportunity right now? And do you see an opportunity on some of the names that have pulled back?

I still think the hyperscalers are well positioned here.

I think you look at a company like Google, that stock has kind of been down in a straight line over the last month.

And the fact is, Google is still at the frontier in terms of its model business.

They've built a really differentiated infrastructure platform, vertically integrated with chips and data centers and all sorts of applications that can be built on top of their infrastructure.

And then meanwhile, they have this search business that is a big AI beneficiary that's accelerating.

So I think, you know, Google's a company where CapEx numbers have been higher than investors have wanted to see.

Hasn't the narrative been that if they don't raise this money and fund their build out that they'd be left behind? I mean, as an investor, how do you feel about just supporting these types of moves and supporting CapEx at this point in the cycle?

So at that point, is there an argument for strongly encouraging them to do an activity or, or do you think that works?

Yeah, definitely, yeah.

Encouragement is important, and it may be a little bit late in some sit- cases for some people, but, but k- kids really do...

You know, they, they look at what you're doing, they take that on board, and down the road, that's...

If it's just part of their life that their parents are getting up and exercising, and they're associating that with, you know, being an adult and growing, they're going to take that on, on some level, themselves as well.

I think the best thing you can do is keep your kid, and we spoke about this the last day I was on, which, uh, keep, keeping them in team sports is so important, so they have another reason to go, to socialize, to meet their friends, to, to hang out, to, you know, to do all that sort of stuff as much as you can.

Now, I know that team sports don't work for every kid, and in that situation, that's where you come back to looking at every other individual sport out there, from martial arts to dance, and, um, I have two very, very young kids, but my, uh, view on it will be that I'll be buying them every single piece of sports [chuckles] equipment I can, and we'll find what they enjoy doing, and that'll be their main staple piece.

... and I, and I'm not knocking, uh, football as, as in soccer, um, but there are certain clubs, they're kind of only interested in you if you're a really good player.

OK, John, let's get to you and talk to me a little bit about your thesis on this tech sell-off.

Well, yeah, I think there's kind of a couple different things going on on the chip side, which Patrick maybe just alluded to.

There's some growing questions about sort of the supply demand environment supply, maybe new supply coming online on the memory and storage side and demand.

You know, how big is this demand cycle going to go? And I think the way I'd link what's happening there to what's happening to the hyperscalers is this kind of concept of token maxing.

I think throughout the start of the year, we had all these widespread reports of exploding revenue figures for the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic.

And more recently, I think you're starting to hear some anecdotes about companies trying to cut back on some of that spend.

So what's going to be the impact on the chip companies and on the hyperscalers? I think that's what the market's sort of grappling with today.

How much do you think, John, Amazon is having some fuel from consumers and how much is just this AI cloud computing that is just dominating headlines and top of mind even for us, even on Prime Day?

So you're sitting down

and some people are not ready to go there.

So it's like, well, what do you want to do? I want to lose weight or I want to run faster.

Brilliant.

Let's do a quick chat about that.

Or it could be, look, I've had a lot of family history problems and I want to address that.

Right.

There's, you know, if it's not NAD, it's...

Whatever Meta's gonna end up doing to tap the markets in order to fund its build out, and Apple's just sitting back.

It's working for them so far.

I think, you know, the market likes that Apple's kinda capital light approach take advantage of all that they've built, their, the distribution that they have across billions of users.

They should be able to distribute AI technology to their users, and I think that's the approach they've taken.

They have been doing some things behind the scenes a- as well, but I think, you know, the first era of AI, the generative AI era, I think kinda passed Apple by.

I think the hope is that they really catch up during the agentic AI era.

Uh, uh, John, jump in here.

Well, I mean, maybe I'll give you some alliteration.

John Belton, is that your experience?

Yeah, my experience with this is...

I've been in the fitness industry a long time and it's evolved from nobody really caring or knowing what we did to it becoming, you know, what every algorithm is showing us.

I think it comes down to this.

This question has been going back and forth.

I'm opening a new facility and I'm going to have a phone free zone in it.

And I think gyms are going to have to have a place where you can record if you want to.

Is there, in general, bad etiquette in our gyms?

From an investor's point of view, as you're kinda looking for, I don't know, the next beats of this whole story as it goes along, where are you most, uh, spending your time or is it just kind of, you know, keep it simple and go with the, uh, established winners?

Yeah, no, I, I think for Nvidia specifically, I'm not spending a ton of time trying to nail the quarterly numbers.

I just, I really don't think it's that important at this point.

I'm looking for is this company broadening out its customer base, because that is a big risk.

Half the business is from basically five large companies which have collectively taken free cash flow to about zero now, so how durable is, is growth within that part of the business? So are they broadening out the customer base? Are they broadening out the product set? So they've, they've definitely done some interesting things with networking.

That's been a big success.

It now seems like they're gonna start standing up standalone CPU racks later this year.

Is there a point in time where that meets sort of your portfolio construction, you c- you think, "Oh, you know, it's time to, to think twice about it"?

Is that the metric? Is that what's going to allow it to gain? I mean, tonight, is it going to be a beat and a raise and then obviously how they're starting to see real revenue in the copilot or is it more than that?

No, I do think this is a stock that, to your point, has been really weak over the last several months.

And it's more than anything, it's been a multiple derating story.

The earnings estimates have generally been positive and heading in the right direction, but the multiple is derated on the fear that the software side of the business, the SaaS side of the business, is ultimately going to lose share to some of these newer offerings from native AI companies.

And so tonight they're going to likely update the market on copilot seats.

So I think they updated the market last time around.

They had 15 million copilot seats, paid seats.

Okay, so what are we likely to hear on the CapEx front as well, if it is really about the ROI on this particular name?

Um, are we at a point now where you have to try to figure out exactly where this is ending in terms of winners, uh, on the AI side, whether it's just, like, f- all boats floated, there's enough cloud, uh, revenue to go around for everybody? Because the frenzy in the hardware side of things suggests that there's indiscriminate buying by those very companies we're gonna hear from on Wednesday.

Yeah, no, I, I think it's, it's a, it's a complicated picture, but I think Mythos is just one, you know, recent catalyst for this space.

I think what I'm frankly more excited about is the revenue figures I've been seeing floated for Anthropic and OpenAI, collectively now doing, what? Something like $70 billion of annualized run rate revenue, and that's more than doubled from the start of the year.

That is direct AI monetization.

That was the whole debate for this space heading into the year.

I think this, this idea that these companies are spending hand over fist on infrastructure and not monetizing that infrastructure, that debate I think has been flipped on its head, and I think that's a v- that's equally as important as the Mythos catalyst to me.

Yeah

... specifically? Well, it's probably the company that I'm most optimistic about longer term, but I think that would be Amazon.

How do you assess things big picture for Yeah,

nice to be with you.

Happy Friday.

I think, you know, Nvidia nearing all-time highs.

The market's at all-time highs.

So, you know, that's one starting point.

I don't think there's anything too idiosyncratic about Nvidia right now.

Is it kind of healthy for Nvidia that maybe it's not the, you know, far and away leader performance-wise as it's scaled up and become the world's most valuable company?

I mean, myself included, I think you'd probably be a little concerned you're not fit enough actually to go to High Rocks.

Yeah.

Now, the first one I ever did was in 20, maybe 22 or 2021 in Hamburg.

And I got in there and I was in, you know, of course, in typical fashion, thought I'd do the best, the hardest one I could do today and did, got in there and it was grand.

But the beauty of it is that every 10 minutes, there's a new heat going out in any of these races.

There's a next, next heat, next heat, next heat.

So there's a constant flow of people coming through it.

Where do you start if you'd like to start? Go and

What should investors be doing right now?

Well, thanks, Nicole.

I think it's a challenging question because we have this backdrop where US stocks before last year had outperformed international stocks very consistently for the last decade.

And that really started to unwind last year into the start of this year.

And it felt like that unwinding and that momentum for certain international markets was very much on track.

And then this conflict happened.

And I think fundamentally this conflict has a much bigger impact on a lot of international markets than it does on the U.S.

But should a portfolio have this exposure abroad and at home? John, what would be some examples?

Right.

But, um, no, I mean, I think the, the Nvidia quarterly earnings reports, the Street has become accustomed to very consistent beats, guides above the Street.

I think part of the reason for the consistency is that the demand is so high that they're supply constrained.

I think that remains the case.

I think what the Street really wants to hear is, beyond this quarter, next quarter, what is the demand outlook into next year? Particularly given that announcement we just heard on-

So, I mean, do we, do we really need to have, you know, one of these, uh, huge estimates for 2027 to, to get it moving?

Well, I mean, I, I think for, for it to work on earnings, you certainly need, uh, a beat.

I think the, the size of the beats over the last couple quarters has been increasing, so I think you could get a big beat here.

Sure, so walking paths are a great way to start

incorporating those little snacks, exercise snacks as we call them, where you're taking a short period of your day and you're increasing the amount of movement you're doing throughout the day.

We want to see, everyone knows, the 10,000 steps, which is a figure that is somewhat random and hard to measure accurately.

However, the biggest thing that we need to take from all this is the importance of more activity and walking is the best place to start there.

So your daily exercise underpins everything else that happens.

So the more you're getting your activity and the more walking you're getting, the better that translates into overall health.

And we see the benefits in other areas, not just people think that, you know, exercise and walking, it's all about just calorie expenditure.

Of course.

And that's where people go wrong, you know.

When I think back to my time of kind of couch to 5k or when I sort of initially started out with running a couple of years ago, what I always struggled with, are you better to do a shorter run, but a higher intensity speed? Or are you better to do the longer run, but a little bit more of a trot?

if you want to train together yeah by all means I'd say a park run is a fantastic place to start the park run's been one of the biggest social experiments in the world and it's changed mental health status it's boosted communities it's changed everything so that's a great place to start another one is to do high rocks together or do an event together pick something to do together But there's lots of healthy reasons to

exercise.

Just on the exercise snacking, I know we're going to share a video here on our own social media account on Newstalk and on your own as well too, John Belton, so people will be able to get some tips and advice there.

John Belton from number 17 Personal Training.

John, thanks a million for joining us on the programme.