Welcome back, everyone. Today on the Joseph Carlson
Show, the tech rally showing signs of losing steam
specifically for AI companies. We're seeing this now in the
data. A lot of investors are getting a
little bit nervous. In fact, they're selling out
more than they're buying in. The market's been flat and even
down a couple days now, even though interest rates are being
lowered. So what do we make of this?
Well, we're going to be looking at some of the data and the
reason that investors are now becoming nervous.
Now, we also have a lot of other news to get to in this episode.
For example, the Trump administration, the US
government is now taking an equity stake in Intel of 10%.
Is it a good idea for the government to be buying private
companies? And what is the purpose of doing
this in the 1st place? We'll be discussing.
We also have Google stock now surging to all time highs.
This one seems to be on a winning streak and now that it's
at all time highs, does that mean that it's expensive?
We'll be looking at Google stock with a discounted cash flow
analysis to try to determine whether or not this company's
expensive. Now, we also have a lot of other
news. There's Netflix with K Pop
demons making it into the box office.
This is bolstered Netflix's stock.
We have the CEO of Uber going on an interview and talking about
the technology between Waymo and Tesla and his take on it.
And we have our financial TikTok review.
We have someone that says that he has the solution to the
United States $37 trillion debt problem.
He has it solved. In fact, he's willing to solve
it himself. We'll be looking at his solution
in this episode as well. So we have a ton to get to in
this episode. And we start things off today
with the signs that we're seeing, the data that we're
seeing that this tech rally is losing steam.
Now as we look at the data here, I first just want to point out
over the past year, not even just year to date, but in the
past trailing year, if you haven't been making money, I
think you've been doing something wrong.
It's just you got to switch your strategy.
If you're not making money, you should be making money,
especially in bull markets. You should be making a lot of
money in bull markets and that's what these portfolios have done.
For example, the passive income portfolio, my main one here, has
made around $100,000 in gains in the past trailing year.
That's not additions, that's not me contributing money.
That's in gains. And this year we've made around
$50,000 in gains, so $100,000 over the trailing 12 months.
Just year to date, it's around 50,000.
Now, which companies are contributing so much over just
the past year? Well, we have companies like
Booking Holdings. This one's up huge over the past
year. This is one of the best
investments that I've made recently.
Microsoft is another huge gainer, around a $40,000 gain on
that one. S&P Global has been great.
MasterCard has been great in the Story Fund in just the past
year. Netflix, which was already my
largest position, grew bigger and bigger.
Of the $84,000 in gains, around 60,000 of that is in the
trailing one year. And then almost all my gains in
Amazon are in the past year as well, $45,000 of gains, like
30,000 plus of that is in the trailing one year.
Of course, Google, Microsoft, and S&P Global have helped out
as well. This tech rally has been really
great for investors that have taken advantage of it, that have
positioned their portfolios correctly.
But now we see news that it could be coming to an end, or at
least slowing down. The prospect of a lower core
interest rates is boosting many parts of the market.
Real estate firms, banks, manufacturers.
But the outlook for Wall Street's most popular stocks,
the Magnificent 7 tech giants that have led major index to
record highs is much less clear. The market leaders these mag
seven companies have been buffeted recently by questions
about the potential for artificial intelligence,
concerns about their increasingly stretched
valuations and competition from hitherto unloved parts of the
market. So we have increasing
competition. We have concerns in doubt about
AI as well. In the coming days, the tech
sector will face a key test when NVIDIA, the world's most
valuable listed company, reports earnings.
What investors learn there could be key to further gains.
So this week we have the big one in question, NVIDIA, and they're
going to be reporting their earnings and giving guidance for
next quarter. Now when NVIDIA gives guidance,
that's the more important part because they can either guide
higher or substantially higher, showing that there's still
continued momentum and increase in exponential growth or they
can guide down and say that growth is actually decelerating
a little bit. We're not going to be guiding up
as much. You know, we're going to be
cooling off for a period and that could cause the market
great concern if that happens. We have investors getting ahead
of this. One of them is Josh Boyer, 43.
He said he's trimmed his exposure to make a cap tech
stocks like NVIDIA, Microsoft and Meta by around 25% in recent
days. The Phoenix resident said that
shares have grown expensive relative to the company's
earnings and said that he is satisfied with the outside
returns over the past several months.
Quote, anytime I see them getting top heavy, I'm totally
fine taking some money off the table, he said.
So this is an investor, which I think is very reasonable.
I don't think he's dumb for doing this.
He's looking at these companies, Meta, Microsoft and NVIDIA.
He's looking at the incredible erformance they've had, the
valuation expansion overtime, and he's taking 25% off the
table. Seems like very reasonable, I
think even good portfolio management.
And apparently he's not alone in this.
There's a lot of people selling out of tech companies
specifically, even though Jay Powell signaled that he's going
to be lowering interest rates. So this seems counterintuitive,
but a lot of people are choosing to do this.
The NASDAQ Composite performed far worse than the Dow Jones
Industrial over the past week. Now, what you hear about online
are still the people that are hyper bullish on these
companies. They'll never give up no matter
the valuation, no matter what the situation is like.
But underneath the surface, there's a lot of people that are
growing a little bit more cautious.
The data suggests that many individual investors, often the
most enthusiastic fans of the tech firms, have grown more
cautious. They were net sellers of the
stock for the first time in two months during Tuesday's steep
tech declines. It's according to JP Morgan
report, Particularly for firms like Palantir, Google and
Broadcom. Either way, the analysts now say
that conditions are primed for a pullback.
The NASDAQ has climbed some 41% from its April 8th low, lifting
valuations for some of the biggest tech firms to sky high
valuation. At the same time of these sky
high valuations with the NASDAQ companies, there's stubbornly
high inflation readings and deepening cracks in the labor
market. This has left investors jittery
and many expected PAL to sound cautious about cutting rates in
his Friday speech. Then on top of that, we have
these added complications, I'd say added problems, where we had
ChatGPT being talked up to be groundbreaking.
Sam Altman shared the Death Star and things to kind of hype this
product and then it was released and it wasn't that
groundbreaking. It was iteratively better.
It was an improvement, but it was more like going from the
iPhone 13 to the 14 instead of the iPhone 1 to the two.
It was not that big of an iteration going to ChatGPT 5.
So we have what seems like a slow down in the development of
AI. While all these companies in the
QQQ are hitting their all time highs in valuation, we have more
and more data pouring in to show that we could be nearing a peak
here. Open AI Chief Executive Sam
Altman just compared the bubble in AI today to the.com bubble.
Now, he did that while running one of the biggest AI companies
in the world. So obviously he doesn't think
that his company's in a bubble, but he's saying that many of
these smaller tech companies are looking a little bit bubbly,
they're looking a little bit overvalued, and we're getting to
this tipping point here. We also have at the same time,
Meta recently just freezing their AI hiring spree.
So Mark Zuckerberg hit the gas pedal.
He hired a bunch of people, and now he's saying no more, we
don't want any more AI talent. We're going to put an abrupt
pause to that as well. And then at the same time, and
again, this is all news, just in the past week, we also have at
the same time a new MIT study saying that 95% of generative AI
companies are failing. They may be generating AI, but
they're not generating revenue. They're not making any money for
investors. That's another thing that's
caused investors to become a little bit more cautious
overall, as the kids say, there's been a vibe shift.
Things have changed just over the past week, like they often
do in the market. We have all this data of
staggering valuations, lots of people that have made a lot of
money in a short amount of time. There's people now looking to
the future and concerned about Nvidia's earnings and whether or
not they'll guide up and by how much.
We have concerns of devaluation. We have prominent people like
Sam Altman talking about bubbles.
We have different people now starting to take gains and take
money off the table, all happening at the very same time
now. I've been somewhat outspoken
whenever the market gets a little bit feeling like it's
expensive and when it gets feeling like it's cheap.
I made a lot of videos about the Trump tariffs and the panic that
happened in April. I made many.
You can go look at all of them. And in each one of them, I said
I was buying the tariff dip. I was buying it aggressively,
and I did. And even during that time
period, I also posted constantly on X talking about how this is
an opportunity. It looks like the walls are
caving in. It looks like the world's caving
in. No one's bullish at all.
It seemed like the US was retreating from trading with
anyone. We're becoming turtles.
We were offending all of our partners.
It looked very grim for about a month, and then after a month
everything changed. The vibe changed, the sentiment
of investors changed, the market surged, and investors that
bought that dip made a lot of money in a short amount of time.
But now we find ourselves back on the other end of the spectrum
here with the stocks going up so much in just a short amount of
time, going up thirty, 4050% in many cases, it seems like it's
now time to become a little bit more cautious.
So here's my advice with anybody that's getting a little bit
nervous about the valuations of the market or the fact that
there may be a sell off now that we've gone up so much recently.
My advice is that if you're going to look over your
portfolio and look over your holdings and do analysis on them
of what you really want to stay owning and what you're not so
sure about, do that analysis now.
Don't wait. Don't wait till the market's
down 10% and then you're concerned and then you look at
your holdings and decide what you really want to own.
The saying goes, if you're going to panic, panic early, sell your
stocks early while you're getting great bids, while the
valuations are high, while you've made a lot of money.
Don't wait till the offers go down where somebody knocks on
your door and says, hey, I'm going to offer you $50 less than
I was just a a week ago for the same stock.
Don't wait until that happens. Look at your portfolios today
and look at what you want to own today, what you're really going
to stay invested in even if the market falls 1020 or 30%.
When I do that, I do continual analysis on My Portfolio and I
make sure that the companies that I own are ones that I would
still want to own even if they went down in price.
Companies that I wouldn't become discouraged and sad and sell
when they're 20 or 30% lower. O The type of companies that I
like to own are incredibly high quality.
They're ones that I know will eventually recover.
If you don't have that type of conviction in the holdings that
you have, it's time to make adjustments and the time again
to do that is before they drop in price.
Now, I don't want to be mistaken here.
I'm not saying to sell out of your high quality companies.
I'm not selling most of my positions.
The only one that I've really trimmed is Texas Roadhouse.
That's the only company that I've really taken some gains in
and I put that money right back into other compounding machines
that I own. So I did a small, small, but
meaningful trade in My Portfolio.
But overall, I'm keeping My Portfolio relatively the same.
I'm invested in companies for the very long term.
But at the same time, if we rewind to April when the market
was down, when valuations were being crushed, when good
companies were being sold off and investors were scared, that
was a time to be different from the pack and be bold and
assertive and buy companies. And on the flip side of that,
right now, I believe it's time to become a little bit more
cautious, not quite as bold or assertive, but a little bit more
conservative. Still hold great companies,
watch them compound, but I think it's a great time to look at our
portfolios and make sure we have what we really want to be
owning. Now let's go to move on to some
news. Now, the first story we jump
into is one that was a little bit shocking when I first heard
it. the United States government, the actual
government of the United States bought a 10% equity stake in
Intel. Now they didn't necessarily buy
it because they didn't have to pay anything upfront, but there
was a deal, there was an agreement.
And this agreement has led to the government taking a large
stake in a very big company, something that we haven't really
seen in the United States. And even though other countries
have sovereign wealth funds, those in and of themselves, they
operate a little bit differently than how this deal happened.
Now, this deal, again, has lots of mechanics behind it, and
we'll be looking at those mechanics in a bit in the
details. But I first want to go into the
back story of how this deal even happened.
What is the story leading up to the United States government, to
the Trump administration brokering this deal where they
now have a 10% equity stake in Intel stock?
Libu Tan, this is the CEO of Intel was anxiously preparing
for the biggest meeting of his life.
Just five months into his tenure as chief executive of Intel, Tan
was already fighting for his job.
A few days earlier, Donald Trump had demanded that he stepped
down and his past ties of the Chinese military.
So Trump is saying you need to get out of this big U.S. company
because you have passed ties to the Chinese military.
That in and of itself is very threatening from the president.
So when the president's tweeting out that an an individual CEO of
a company needs to step down, like that company's going to be
in a flurry, that's going to cause a massive panic,
especially for one like Intel that is in desperate need of
good leadership. They've already swapped out CEOs
a couple times. The past CEOs have not done a
great job with this company. Now, of course, this tweet or
truth or whatever you want to call it, the demand sent Intel's
leadership into a panic. They immediately contacted the
White House for a meeting, and Tom flew to Washington, huddling
with his advisors for hours on Sunday, August 10th.
His team reassured him that the president would hear him out
because, quote, Trump loves meetings with CE OS, even those
who he has publicly attacked, according to people with
knowledge of the conversations. The next day, Tom met with
Trump, the Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and the Treasury
Secretary Scott Besant in the Oval Office.
He sought to convince the president that he wasn't a
Chinese spy and that the US government has a long standing
or long term interest in bolstering Intel, one of the
only homegrown manufacturers of computer chips that power the
modern economy. The CE OS arguments proved
persuasive. The president also took a liking
to Tan, the Malaysian born, Singapore raised U.S. citizen
who once considered a career as a professional baseball player
and backed off in his demands for the CEO to be ousted.
So basically the CEO here, he did the right thing, which is
instead of having an online battle, this tit for tat back
and forth between President Trump and the CEO, That's the
route that you don't want to go. What you want to do with Trump,
I, I just think with his personality is get on a plane
and go meet him in person, give him a, a really solid handshake,
talk about, you know, that you like what he's doing, you want
to invest in the US, you know, that type of thing.
And that's exactly what he did. He talked about how they're one
of the big U.S. companies. They have huge incentive to
invest more into the US. And he got on Trump's good side.
So now Trump is no longer wanting to oust him.
He made friends with Trump by making a visit in person.
Now, that's the story so far. But there's more to this.
The truce came with a cost. In return for Trump's support,
the administration proposed taking an equity stake in the
company. It decided to convert nearly $9
billion in grants promised to Intel as part of the 2022 CHIPS
Act into a 10% equity stake in the company, an unusual
arrangement that makes the government Intel's biggest
shareholder. So they're saying this is under
the CHIPS Act that we now have $9 billion to put into Intel to
become the largest shareholder. Now, that's a bit of background
of how this deal transpired, and you can see that this may raise
some concerns. Why did the US government decide
to take equity out of Intel? What was the specific reasoning
behind it? Was it just for the CEO to
protect his job? Did he exchange job protection
for selling part of Intel or letting this deal transpire?
A lot of these questions remain, but we have a bit more detail on
this from people like Kevin Hassett, who's part of the
administration. He was part of this deal as
well. Let's go ahead and listen to him
being questioned by Andrew Ross Sorkin and some of the responses
he gives. In the past, the federal
government has been giving money away lickety split to companies
and the taxpayers have received nothing in return.
And so now what's happening with with the Intel deal is the CHIPS
act of money is come going out as planned.
But instead of it just going out and disappearing into the ether,
the US taxpayers are getting a little bit of equity.
I can really not see how anyone would think that's a bad thing,
unless you thought that the government was then going to go
in and run the company. But but these are going to be
shares that don't have voting rights the government's going to
stay out of. It So the argument from the
administration and people like Kevin Hassett is that the US
government is done being the Piggy Bank for all these big
companies and instead of just handing out money with asking
for nothing in return, they're now going to take equity stakes
in these companies that want this money.
That's what their argument is. But I think it's a rather weak
argument. First of all, the history of the
US government, when it hands out money to large corporations is
almost always to get that money back through loans.
That's what happened with the banks.
Remember when the banks got bailed out by the US government,
it looked really bad because the US government was giving them,
it was giving them a get out of jail free card, which a lot of
people didn't like. But if you look at the details
of those deals that the US government made with their
infusement of money in those banks, all of them have paid
back the government with interest.
In fact, in terms of loans, those were great loans being
paid back to the taxpayer. So there's many cases where the
US government has lent out money to private companies or
different companies that are really important, but they've
gotten paid back and the taxpayer has been made whole.
And there's no reason why they couldn't do that in this
situation as well. The problems with taking an
equity stake in a company, the problems with the US government
or the Trump administration making this investment is that
now Trump is aligned with Intel. He has personal vested interest
in Intel succeeding. Think about this.
If Trump buys a $9 billion stake with the taxpayer dollar in
Intel, and then the stock price starts to trend downward and it
goes down and down and down, and then there's news articles
saying that Trump made a bad investment.
He's losing taxpayer money in Intel stock.
What can Trump do to try to bolster that investment?
He could do executive orders or different laws to benefit them.
He can make it so that they have more favorable treatment with
tariffs than other competitors. He could do a lot of things to
bolster Intel stock to make his investment in the company look
better because now he has his reputation attached specifically
to that company. And it also extends further from
there. Now that the US government is
invested directly into Intel by owning a huge portion of the
stock, being the biggest shareholder.
It also shows competitors to Intel that the US government is
vested in this company. There could be the case where
other competitors that wanted to do business in the United
States, that wanted to build manufacturing plants here now
view it as more unfavorable because they have a bigger
competitor, which is a government backed Intel.
So there's lots of 2nd and 3rd order effects to this.
I think there's a lot of things that could be unexpected
consequences, as well as the fact that I believe that this is
a massive slippery slope. Some people refer to the
slippery slope argument as a logical fallacy.
It is not. The slippery slope argument is
real when the government steps its foot into one part of 1
industry, like it is taking a direct equity stake in a company
like this. If it becomes acceptable and
normal, we could see a lot more of this going on, different
excuses, different reasons for the government to be buying more
and more private companies, which could transition this from
less of a free market capitalist system where the government has
vested interest in certain companies succeeding over their
competitors. And overall, my reaction to this
deal is I'm very concerned that this will be a slippery slope
situation that we're going to see more and more deal making,
more and more of the government taking equity stakes and less of
free market capitalism. I hope that's not the case.
I hope that this is a complete one off situation that it's not
repeated on a broader scale, but we'll have to wait and see.
Now moving on, we get to an AI company that continues to win.
In fact, this is one that I talk about frequently, but it
continues to surge up into all time highs.
And this is a situation where even with Google, some investors
could become potentially concerned that this stock is
getting a little expensive because it's now at $210.00 per
share. And again, if we zoom out here,
if we look at the chart over time, let's take a look at the
price chart, we can go back five years or 10 years.
This is an all time high for Google.
So we did it. This one is a real winner.
We are winning with Google stock.
I'm really glad to see that Google stock is doing so well,
not only because it's a big holding of mine, it's in both of
my portfolios, but also because it's a company that many
investors own. I can see the analytics on
Qualtrim. I can see which stocks are the
most searched, which ones do people have in the most watch
list, Which ones do people have in their portfolios.
And Google is one of the most heavily owned and tracked stocks
in the market by retail investors.
And I love that it's doing so well.
And I have reason to believe that Google's just going to keep
doing better and better and better.
We have here that Google's AI mode is expanding globally, and
it adds a new agentic feature. Users can now use the AI mode to
find restaurant reservations, and in the future they'll be
able to find local service appointments and event tickets.
Users can request dinner reservations based on multiple
preferences such as party size, date, time, location and
preferred cuisine. AI Mode will then research or
will search across different reservation platforms to find
real time availability for restaurants that match the
inquiry. It then surfaces A curated list
of options to choose from. This new capabilities rolling
out to the premium users already and they have a little bit of a
mock up of the user interface. So basically if you want to find
a reservation at a restaurant, you're now able to do it
directly through AI Mode and it will have a different interface
that shows you it Just like this.
They say that the AI Mode will now see search results as
tailored to their individual preferences and interest.
For example, if someone searches I only have an hour, need a
quick lunch spot. Any suggestions?
AI mode will use their past conversations, along with places
they've researched or clicked in the search of maps to offer more
relevant suggestions. So if the AI mode infers that
you like Italian food and places without outdoor seating, you'll
get results suggesting options with those preferences.
So here's Google leveraging all the data that they already have,
the maps, you know, they'll leverage your Gmail, they'll
they'll probably leverage everything that they use in
their ecosystem to better inform and better help out with
suggestions with your searches. Now with Google, it seems like
there's nothing that can stop this company at this point.
It will continue to just compound, take more market share
and dominate with its continual incredibly strong earnings
reports. Mark Mahaney also remains
bullish on this company. It's still his top pick in large
tech, and he says that Google is now in the lead in multiple
categories. Google is running the race.
It's in the leadership position or one of the leaders in AI.
And I think a couple of months ago at 160 when the stock was
down there, I think they were real fears that it was going to
be left behind. But no, look, with Gemini, I
think they've got one of the best large language models out
there. They've obviously got a
wonderful distribution platform in Google, the most widely used
Internet asset out there. And then we've also got coming
up this week, almost certainly judge's decision in the
antitrust monopoly case. We hope that it's going to be a
clearing event. It's very hard to handicap the
the outcome of the event. But at the end, if you look at
all of the AI companies that are out there, this is the cheapest
1. I mean, it's AIDS at the direct
AI companies. This trades at 19 times earnings
and I think there's still material upside.
That's why we like the stock. He mentions that there's still a
clearing event with the judge's ruling that's going to happen
sometime this week. So that is imminent.
And we'll see whether or not the judge takes the extreme stance
of forcing Google to sell off Chrome, which will lead to more
uncertainty, more appeals, years long of Google having that way
over their head or whether or not they come up with a better,
less extreme remedy for the situation.
But either way, Mark Mahaney still believes that Google stock
is undervalued and so do I. Now, when we get into a
discussion question about valuation, it's important to
note that even though a company has gone through really good
performance, even though it's reaching all time highs, that
does not mean that it's getting expensive or that it's
overvalued. When we look at Google, we can
just take a look at the DCF calculator.
Now this is a tool in Qualtrim where you can make some simple
assumptions about a company, both their multiple and their
growth rate. And from those two metrics
alone, you can determine what your rate of return is going to
be owning this company. If we look at Google, for
example, the current PE ratio is 22.
We have earnings per share growth of 19.4%.
So fast earnings per share growth.
And we can make a couple assumptions here.
For example, if we assume that the earnings per share growth is
going to moderate over time over the next five years, it's going
to grow at 15% that the appropriate earnings per share
multiple is a 25. That would make it so that we
have a 16 percent, 16 1/2 percent return per year every
year for the next 5 years. Now we also have our desired
return based on these assumptions, the 25 multiple,
the 15% earnings per share growth rate and a desired return
of 15% per year, which I believe is a good benchmark that will
likely beat out the S&P 500 in the QQQ.
We could still buy Google up until $224 per share and get
that 15% return. So right now we're getting a 16
1/2. We can continue to buy the stock
until it's 224. And with these assumptions,
we'll still outperform the market.
Now, even if we moderate these assumptions, let's say that
Google doesn't grow quite as fast, that the earnings per
share growth rate goes to 13% and the multiple moderates at
around 22. That still gives us a 12%
annualized return. That's a really strong return
that's still likely to outperform the S&P 500, but
it'll probably come in in line or a little bit above the QQQ.
So even with more moderate, more conservative assumptions, we're
still outperforming at this point.
But I have no good argument, no reason to believe that Google
deserves a 22 PE ratio. And that's why Google stock
today remains undervalued. Now Speaking of stocks that are
doing well, we have Netflix. This company is up a little bit
today. It's outperforming market on the
day. And we look at it this year,
it's up big this year, 38% gains.
It's leveled out around the 12112 fifty mark.
So it's not at all time highs, but it's but it's been trading
around this range. It's found a little bit of
support around this range. But I believe there's a good
chance for Netflix to gain the remainder of this year.
And it remains one of my biggest positions.
When we look at the reason why one of the concerns of Netflix,
in fact, I would say it's one of the only concerns about this
company is total market share. The market share for Netflix is
held roughly steady with slight gains year over year, but
YouTube is far outpacing it and watch time and market share gain
even though Netflix is growing. But Netflix is showing signs
that it's getting a lot more engagement recently, especially
with this new hit called K Pop Demon Hunters.
It's a very interesting movie. It's it's all singing, it's
animated. It's mostly targeted towards
kids. If you have kids, they're
probably playing this one on repeat.
The numbers of how much this movie has been seen is
staggering. If we want to compare this to
other huge movies on Netflix, we can take a look at the chart
here. We have the dark line there.
That's K Pop Demon Hunters, which had a very slow starting
week. You can see that it barely
bumped up. It was beat by all these other
premieres, but then it just seems like it it caught hold.
All all the kids, all these people started watching it over
and over again and it's just steadily surpassing every other
movie with no end insight. Look at the growth of this.
We have Carry On. We have Red Notice.
We have Don't Look Up. These are huge movies.
One of them has Leonardo DiCaprio, right?
These are big Netflix originals and all of them went up fast,
but then they started to plateau.
The one that continued up for the longest was Red Notice, big
general action movie with a lot of big stars in it.
In fact, I think it's almost a certainty at this point that K
Pop Demon Hunters is going to crush all of these.
Now, Netflix being the savvy company that they are, they
actually bought this property from Sony.
So Sony produced it. Netflix said, well, we'll take
that, we'll buy it from you. They used their massive
distribution like they've done before, many times repeatedly to
make it a massive hit, the number one hit.
And now that they have it as a massive hit on their streaming
service, they also just showed it in a very limited way in the
box office over a weekend. K Pop Demon Hunters LED all
films over the weekend with 16 to $18 million in ticket sales.
Now, keep in mind, they made this much money, $18 million in
box office sales without even going into AMC.
So AMC did not do this limited screening.
I think this just shows the ability for Netflix to pull a
rabbit out of their hat. Every single year, every
quarter, there's some big phenomenon that comes completely
out of left field with this one. It's literally a movie about
this K pop superstar trio who doubled as demon hunters.
Now the members of this trio, they're like the good guys in it
and they must protect their fans and faced their biggest enemy
yet, a rival boy band made-up of demons in disguise.
And that right there, of course, is the biggest movie of the
year, one that's going to have the most watch time almost by
far. And it's one that nobody could
have predicted. Now moving on, we get to an
interview with Dara, the CEO of Uber.
He goes ahead and he shares his thoughts on the safety concerns
and the technology currently. I think in the near term is
going to be very difficult and Elon would tell me I'm wrong and
never bet against him. But it's my instinct that in the
near term it's going to be very difficult to build a camera only
product that has superhuman levels of safety.
And again, now at some point will it be possible?
Quite possibly, yes. But if you can have
instrumentation that includes cameras and Lidar and the cost
of LIDAR, you know, solid-state Lidar now is 405 hundred bucks,
why not include LIDAR as well in order to achieve superhuman
safety? So possible, yeah, it will be
possible. I don't know when, but is the
possible the better product? I'm not sure I would.
I All of our partners that we're working with now are using a
combination of camera, radar and LIDAR and you know, I personally
think that's, that's the right solution.
Dara clearly believes that the better route to go here is with
Lidar. He even addresses the argument
that it's not scalable or it's too expensive by saying that
solid-state LIDAR is now about 500 bucks, so why not add it
when it is proven to show superhuman levels of safety.
And in fact, you have more data to work with.
You have multi model data, you have Lidar, radar and camera,
which if you synthesize that data together, it creates a more
clear data set. Even the people that have worked
on the robotaxi at Tesla said that there is a margin between
the data set that you get. In fact, when Tesla decided to
remove the sensors out of their vehicles, that's when they
started to have the phantom breaking issue where the car
will randomly break if it sees a shadow wrong and interprets it
as an object. That's a problem that still
happens to this day. So I think it's going to be more
challenging for Tesla. We'll see if they do it over
time, but Uber is probably OK either way.
Now finally, we get to the most important segment of the day,
which is the financial TikTok reaction.
This individual here has a plan of solving America's debt.
We have $37 trillion in debt. We're gaining like another
trillion dollars every every year.
It's just an incredible amount of debt.
So I'm happy to see that this this individual is is he's going
to solve it. He has a plan to solve it.
Let's go ahead and listen to his plan.
No, America is $1 trillion in debt, but I know how we could
solve this. Let me take the debt, bro.
Someone has to do it. Someone has to step up and be a
freaking trillion dollars in debt.
And I'm not afraid to be that guy, All right?
I'll be the one that's freaking in a trillion dollars of debt
because you know what I'm saying?
Who's that he? He, this is his plan.
He's going to, he's going to take the debt for us.
That's really kind. I think he's really, you know,
that's a lot of debt. Some people complain about
having like twenty, $30,000 of debt.
They might have a mortgage payment or a car loan.
Imagine having $37 trillion of debt.
That'd be so tough. Like imagine those interest
payments. You have to pay $700 billion in
interest per year. That's a lot.
I think that would that would weigh down on me.
Like I even with a higher income than average, I still think I'd
have trouble paying off $37 trillion of debt.
So that's really kind of him to to take this on.
I think he continues on here explaining how he's willing to
be this sacrificial lamb. Then in debt too.
Who's the one that's going to pay this debt?
This debt doesn't even really exist.
Let me be the one to have this debt bro 'cause then I could say
I'm a trillion dollars in debt. I'm a trillionaire, you know
what I'm saying? That would make me a real
trillionaire. He may have a a misunderstanding
of what it means to be a trillionaire.
He also mentions that he doesn't believe the debt is even real.
That's the point that we've gotten into in society.
The debt's so much. It's not even a real number.
Like we're you know, who even owns this debt?
Who do we have to pay back with it?
Is it even real? But either way, in TikTok, we
only get the finest and this is another example.
He's willing to take on all the step for us and solve this
problem once and for all. And for that, I commend him.
Now that's going to be it for this episode.
Hope you enjoyed seeing the next one.