Welcome back everyone. Today on the Joseph Carlson
Show. While the market is going up in
2025, we have the S&P 500 doing well.
We have the QQQ doing well. We have even the Mag 7 doing
really well, except for one, Amazon stands alone as a company
that's not performing well this year.
In fact, as MarketWatch points out, Amazon is the worst
performing of the big tech Mag Seven companies, and it risks
falling behind in the AI race. So what's going on with Amazon?
This is a company that, after all, is one of my largest
positions. I own over 600 shares of Amazon,
roughly $133,000 of the stock. That's almost as much value as I
own in Netflix. So Amazon has moved up to a
massive position in My Portfolio, one of the top
holdings. We have articles here that is
falling behind an AI. Well, I don't believe that this
is going to last long. And like I've said before, we
have stocks that are doing really well, like Google, that
have seen their day over the past four months.
That stock is doing incredibly well.
Now. Google has moved up to a share
price much more in line with its future potential.
And we have Amazon sitting here still at $220 per share.
Where does that leave us? Well, I believe over the next
five years, Amazon has immense potential as a stock, potential
to double. In fact, I believe that there's
five basic reasons that Amazon stock is going to go up and I'm
going to outline my thesis these five different reasons of why
this may be one of the best buys today.
Now we also have news of the evolving drama of Jimmy Kimmel,
ABC and censorship. Over the past couple of days.
Disney has decided to bring Jimmy Kimmel back on.
The show aired last night in what was one of the most
anticipated Jimmy Kimmel shows possibly ever.
He was just fired and brought back on only a few days later.
So a lot of people are interested in seeing what he had
to say. What is he going to do in his
monologue? How is he going to address this
controversy? How is he going to address his
previous comments? Well, we're going to be taking a
look at it. I'll be showing some clips from
the monologue. We'll be looking at how he's
addressing it and how this effects Disney.
We also have news on the topic of censorship that YouTube has
previously banned millions of channels because of COVID
misinformation. They are reversing a lot of that
policy and allowing those channels to come back on.
We'll be discussing them and we have Mark Mahaney, an analyst
that I believe is one of the best, explaining why he believes
that Netflix, yes, Netflix is one of the best companies in the
market today and why he believes it's going to go up 20% from
where it sits today. So we'll be looking at that as
well. So, as always, we have a ton to
get to in this episode and we kick things off with Amazon.
As we see here from MarketWatch, they point out that Amazon is
the worst performing stock in the mag seven-year to date.
The Magnificent 7 has been the dominant force in the market
this year, but at least one of its members didn't get the memo.
On Tuesday, Amazon became the worst performing Magnificent 7
stock year to date. The position was previously
occupied by Apple, but a surge of increased investor confidence
on the back of robust iPhone sales sent that stock into the
positive territory for the year yesterday, and it crossed a head
of Amazon on Tuesday. So, so far, Apple's kind of been
in that territory of not performing too well, and it
makes sense why Apple wasn't growing revenue and the
valuation was very high. But now even Apple's performing
better than Amazon. Shares of Amazon have returned
just .6% so far this year, largely due to investor concerns
about the company's Amazon Web Services and the Business of
Artificial Intelligence strategy.
In July, Amazon's quarterly earnings report showed 17.5%
growth rate for AWS. It only matched investors
expectations instead of beating them.
In contrast, Microsoft Corp saw its cloud business growth 39%
and Google saw its cloud business growth 32% in the
quarter. Both of those rates exceeded
analyst expectations, so even though Amazon came in mostly in
line, the other clouds grew so quickly exceeding their
expectations that by contrast, it made Amazon look like a
loser. And then to add insult to
injury, we had the earnings call where we had a chance for Andy
Jassi to address the issue. Andy Jassi on the call failed to
provide specific AWS guidance on the most recent earnings call,
leaving investors uncertain about exactly what was going on
with the business. And I'll add that Andy Jassi,
when asked about why AWS is performing worse than
competitors, he said that this is just a moment in time.
That was the exact phrase that it's only a moment in time.
And then he went on for a multi minute long explanation, 3 or 4
minutes explaining all the things that AWS can do,
basically explaining how good of software it is, how powerful AWS
is, all the different tool kits that it has.
But that did not address investors concerns of why Google
Cloud and why Microsoft Azure are growing so much faster.
So Andy Jassi did a poor job of addressing investors concerns.
So where does that leave us now? Well, if we look at Amazon and
we can take a look at the DIP Finder here on Qualtrim, we can
take a look at the Max seven I've entered these stocks in.
And if we just look left to right, we can see the worst
performing to the best performing this year.
Amazon is just teetering from the red to the green right now.
It's barely up .29% on a year to date basis.
Then we have Apple up 3%, Tesla up 15, Microsoft is just
crushing it at 21%, Meta at 26, NVIDIA at 27 and then we have
right here the king. Google at 30% returns this year
and it's still headed upwards. So Google has been crushing it
along with many of these other companies.
Amazon is being left behind and this is part of the reason why
investors are starting to turn their attention to Amazon.
Many investors are concluding that with all these other
companies doing so well and Amazon being left behind, maybe
now it's an opportunity. And I believe that's just the
case. So let's go ahead and take a
look at Amazon and the five reasons I believe this stock is
well prepared for the future and it's certainly a buy today.
First of all, I just want to dress the whole issue of Andy
Jassy's comments and him not giving a good explanation and
the earnings call being bad for Amazon stock.
There's many cases that we've had before where CEO gets on an
earnings call and says the wrong thing.
CE OS are human. They're they're just trying to
answer questions. They're not going to put
everything perfectly every time. Andy Jassy's not perfect and
we've seen examples of this type of thing before.
The ASMLCEO went on the earnings call and he said because of
uncertainty with all the tariff stuff, we don't know if we're
going to grow next year. Because if things go into the
worst case scenarios, if we have lots of tariff challenges and
trade restrictions, maybe that affects our company.
Just by saying that the stock dropped 10%, this is exactly
when the CEO made that comment right there.
So the stock dropped a huge amount in the following days and
then continued to go down after those remarks.
But look at the stock today without even a new earnings
report. ASML has not only gone back up
to before the CE OS comments, but now it's at all time highs
nearing $1000 per share. And the truth is, this type of
stuff happens all the time. Not every CEO is going to pump
the stock on the earnings call, but that doesn't mean that it's
not a good deal. If we look at Amazon, we can
look at this company. I think in similar fashion, when
I look at the response that Andy Jassy gave about the slower
growth of AWS compared to its pairs, I thought his response
was not good. In fact, I thought I could give
a better response or at least explain the situation more.
First of all, when we look at AWS, keep in mind that this is a
business line that we're supposed to be concerned about.
Now, does this look like the chart of a business we should be
concerned about? Last quarter growing 17.7% with
a trailing 12 months revenue of $116 billion?
Not only is AWS bigger than any other cloud, it's almost as big
as Azure and Google Cloud combined, but it's also growing
near 20%. Now it is true that Amazon Web
Services didn't grow as fast as Azure or Google Cloud, but there
are some key differences. First of all, Google Cloud is a
fraction of the size of AWS, so you can grow a bit a bit faster
when you're a lot smaller. That's a a very known thing when
you talk about Microsoft Azure. That one's a bit more
complicated to address because it did grow faster in total
dollars than AWS even at a smaller size, which shouldn't be
the case. And this is where Andy Jassi had
the opportunity to highlight some unique aspects of AWS and
it's number one of why I'm bullish on Amazon over the next
five years. I believe that Amazon is
actually the most well diversified and set up cloud in
every single hyper scaler in every cloud company.
And the reason why is because of the diversification of their
customer base. The big reason that Azure grew
at that astounding rate that it did was because of huge
customers migrating from on premise into the cloud.
Microsoft does a lot of business with Fortune 500 companies.
When they convinced those businesses to move their
workloads from on premise to the cloud, you get massive
unexpected growth. So while that growth can be
exciting in the short term, it's lumpier, it's less consistent,
and it's not as much of an ongoing compounding growth over
time. What Amazon has, it's unique is
over 4 million customers on AWS. They have vastly more.
In fact, it's likely four times as much as Microsoft.
When you look at that compared to even Google Cloud.
Most third party estimates are that Google Cloud have around
1,000,000. So Amazon's size in customer
base is immense. And although that means that
they won't have any single quarter where they'll see
massive, substantial growth, it does mean that you'll have a
more diversified, more consistent, more compounded
growth over long periods of time.
Andy Jassi had the opportunity to highlight the distinctions
and differences and not only just the growth quarter by
quarter, but the diversification of customer base, the quality of
growth, how much of the market in customers they've captured
and how those customers rely on Amazon because of the advanced
tooling. This is all true.
It's all backed up by third party analysis, but it's
something that Andy Jassi failed to highlight.
But this will likely be a huge catalyst to Amazon stock over
the next five years. We shouldn't be concerned about
Amazon's AWS. That shouldn't be something that
investors are frightened about. It's $120 billion of run rate.
It's massively bigger than Azure and Google Cloud, almost as big
as them. Combined, they have four times
the customers and they have operating margins that
continually go up and the operating margins are already at
33%. So it's massively profitable.
This is not just a business that we should be concerned about,
but it's a business that we should be celebrating and
excited about. Even the AWS customer
commitments, the people contracting to do business in
the future grew by 25%. Amazon has an excellent business
here, likely the highest quality of all the cloud companies.
To add on top of this, and again, this is just point number
one of I'm bullish of this company is not only the customer
diversification, the rapid growth, the huge scale the
Amazon operates at, but we also have reports with semi analysis.
I've highlighted this before in depth.
The Amazon is now going into unique hardware in combination
with their software. So we already have the AWS
software layer with all their toolings that they built out for
the past decade. But now we have hardware.
It's called Tranium, a new chip that's competitive with NVIDIA.
It's not quite as good on all benchmarks.
NVIDIA of course, leads the market, but Tranium is being
built specifically for Anthropic, the AI model that
Amazon owns the majority of. So Amazon is trying to create
this new vertically integrated partnership, very similar to
Chachi BT in Azure or Gemini and Google Cloud.
Amazon's building its own vertically integrated system and
there are massive data warehouses that Amazon has
invested a ton of money in that are coming online very soon.
This should be a massive tailwind for Amazon's AWS.
In fact, in this write up from semi analysis, they argue that
Amazon's AWS service, they argue that Amazon's AWS, it will not
slow down. In fact, not only is it not
going to slow down, it's going to re accelerate every single
quarter. It should re accelerate from 17%
to 19 to 20 and so on. They believe that it will be
above 20% revenue growth even at the massive scale because of
these new data centers and this unique partnership.
If Amazon's AWS continues to compound like it is, if they
keep the margins where they are, this company will not only do
well, but it will grow. The stock price will go up
specifically as a result of AWS reacceleration.
So if that happens, which I believe there is a strong chance
it could happen, I think the stock is going higher than 220.
That's point #1 now we move on to reason #2 the Amazon stock
will double over the next five years.
And this is a point that I've personally done a lot of
research on. I've just done a lot of work on
this and I become increasingly convinced that this is the case.
I believe strongly that out of all the companies out there,
Amazon is uniquely in a position to benefit them most from
robotics and automation more than any other company,
including Google, including Tesla.
Let's go ahead and look at a couple of the reasons why.
This is a write up that I did a couple months ago.
I published it to my my Discord and Patreon and I want to go
over just a couple of the reasons outlined here.
First of all, in order to find a company that can really benefit
from robotics and automation, they need to have the talent to
build robots. They need to have the tech
talent and the skill set to be able to do that.
So you need strong in house tech talent.
Amazon has developed a deep bench of engineers and
scientists, from AWS cloud architects to AI researchers
capable of developing and deploying advanced AI robotic
solution. Few retailers have comparable
tech prowess. So Amazon is uniquely one of the
big companies that has huge tech talent, more so than Walmart,
more so than Costco. You know, they're right up there
with Tesla and Google. But then we also have a company
that has uniquely large and complex operations.
Amazon's business isn't simple online sales.
It's an expansive logistics operation with hundreds of
warehouses, transportation fleets, and real time inventory
systems. This complexity means that
there's many processes that AI can optimize, routing,
packaging, inventory management, et cetera.
The gains from even small efficiency scale across millions
of transactions. Any margin efficiency is
massive, and that's an important point here.
We need to find a company in order to benefit the most from
robotics and AIA company that has high volume, low margins.
Everybody talks about AWS as being the good business.
Then you have Amazon's retail as being the bad business and the
reason why AWS is at very high margins, retail is at very low
margins. If you have operational
efficiency driven by robotics and automation to lift up the
margins of that lower margin business, suddenly Amazon
doesn't have a low quality business paired with a high
quality one. It has 2 high quality
businesses. Another point, and this is what
I highlighted as the most important point, we need a
company that has all these prerequisites, strong tech
talent, large complex operations, but most
importantly, you need robots to be able to replace what humans
are already doing. We need a huge labor intensive
workforce. Amazon employs over 1.5 million
people globally, including roughly 1.2 million in its
fulfilment center warehouses alone.
We already know that Amazon can build cars that drive
themselves. It's called Zoox.
They're literally doing that right now in Vegas.
The Zook's vehicle is driving around with no employee, no one
else in the driver's seat. In fact, it doesn't even have a
driver's seat. So this thing is driving itself.
Well, simple logic dictates that if they can do that in a busy
city of Vegas, they can certainly make vehicles that can
drive around your neighborhood, pull in front of your house, and
eventually have a robot jump out and deliver your package.
It seems a little crazy. I mean, it seems a little
fanciful right now, but we already know that's the way
things are headed. And again, the number of
employees they have doing that are in orders of millions.
They have 700,000 people working as delivery drivers and in their
warehouses. All of these, virtually every
one of them can be automated to some degree.
Now, there's always going to be some humans in the mix, so I
have no illusions that Amazon's going to fire every employee.
But we can certainly have a situation where robots are doing
all this routine, manual and repetitive work while humans use
more of a supervisory role. They fill in where robots may
have got things wrong or where they're stuck, where they're
having errors or glitches. That's going to be the role that
humans play in the future. A lot of employees today are
doing tasks that are repetitive, low judgement tasks, and Amazon
is still paying them 25 dollars, $30.00 an hour, paying for their
college, for their health expenses.
That's a very expensive price to pay for something that
eventually a robot can do on a marginal basis for free,
repetitive over and over again, and work all day.
Not only can they work more hours, but they aren't paid
health insurance. They don't need time off, they
only need routine maintenance. Amazon spent $60 billion last
year, a huge portion of that in fact, the majority of it being
specifically on these routine tasks.
So Amazon has the opportunity to get incremental margin
efficiency through robotics over the next five years.
If that drops to the bottom line, which I believe it will,
that is massive profits for this company.
Keep in mind that right now Amazon is not optimized for
profits. If this dynamic shifts, we're
stock based. Compensation continues to go
down, the cost of employees goes down and salaries go down while
margins pick up and free cash flow picks up.
We'll see a much more healthy, profitable company.
And this robotics play for Amazon follows their same exact
identical past of what they've always done.
Just think about it. Amazon originally only sold
their own items on Amazon.com. It was all stuff that they
fulfilled. There is no third party sellers.
But then they said, hey, look, we have all these warehouses, we
have this website, let's make it so other people can sell stuff
on our website as well. Now that's over half the sales.
Take a look at AWS. AWS started as just servers for
Amazon, but they said, hey look, we have extra capacity.
We can make it so other people could host on our servers as
well, and we'll just take care of that for them.
Now, AWS is primarily a product for other people, not just for
Amazon. You also have robotics.
Robotics, again, will start the exact same way.
Amazon has over 1,000,000 robots working in their warehouses.
They'll originally have them working for themselves.
Even when they build autonomous robots, humanoid robots, ones
that can walk around and deliver packages, they will initially be
purpose built for Amazon's own purposes, for delivering
packages. But eventually Amazon will have
the technology down so well, they'll have been able to test
it with their own products, their own services, so well that
they'll be able to sell them to other people.
That's how it worked with AWS. That's how it worked with the
online sales. That's what Amazon does.
They build for themselves first. Then once they get it down, they
sell it to the public. And I believe that will be the
next step of Amazon now #3 of why I believe Amazon is a buy
today and the stock is going to double over the next five years.
I believe that it's good to invest in companies that have
something called high lifetime value, meaning companies where
customers just use them every single day, every year, year
after year after year for their entire lives.
Companies that people just never move away from.
Those are the type of companies I try to target.
Ones like Netflix, Netflix is just a part of people's lives.
Ones like Google where they have YouTube, that's just a part of
people's lives. It's never going to go away.
You also have, of course, other ones like Costco.
It becomes a routine part of people's lives.
They go there every week of the year.
Then, of course, we have Amazon, which I believe is becoming a
bigger and bigger part of people's lives over time.
All the evidence shows that. And part of that is because of
their digital ecosystem, their overall value proposition, their
subscription. Amazon has built the Amazon
Prime subscription as a standard de facto membership for family
households. Almost every household in
America has one of these memberships, and that's because
the value proposition is incredibly good.
It's very difficult to pass up. For example, when we look at
Amazon Prime actually has you can just take a brief look at
where they're headed with this. First of all, you get delivery
benefits, fast, free delivery. This is one of the biggest
benefits, but I actually don't think it's the biggest benefit
of Amazon Prime. I believe that right now, today
and in the future, the entertainment benefits outweigh
the shipping benefits. You know that I'm invested in
Netflix. I'm very bullish on Netflix and
I believe the stock is going to double over the next five years.
Well, the second place winner I believe in this category is
Prime Video. It's the first stop
entertainment destination, offering customers a vast
collection of premium programming in one app available
across thousands of devices. They're building out more key
series, they're building out more movies, they're building
out more long term content, and this is a huge growth driver for
the company. Long term.
People love content, they love being entertained.
This is just another pull for the Prime membership.
Then you have countless other benefits.
Amazon Music, you get access to a free version of this, which is
actually quite good for just being included.
It makes it so Amazon Music Unlimited is much cheaper.
You have Prime Gaming. This is something that they're
trying to build out similar to Netflix.
It hasn't taken root yet, but it's another value proposition.
We have Amazon Photos, which is actually pretty incredible.
Prime members get unlimited full resolution photo storage with
five gigs of video storage, exclusive deals.
They have a Prime Visa membership card and so on and so
forth. Amazon is aggressively building
out their entertainment. What deals with the NFL?
Deals with the NBA? They're negotiating for more
sports rights and contracts with soccer.
They're trying to do this across the board.
Amazon is trying to win at media at the same time as winning in
cloud, and most other cloud companies are not doing this to
the same degree. This is a high margin portion of
the company that continues to grow above 10%.
Now #4 of why I think this stock is going to double in the next 5
years is simply the advertising business.
Amazon is #3 globally behind Google and Meta.
Now. Google and Meta are kings of
advertising, but in a different way than Amazon.
Google, Meta are everywhere with their social media networks, all
the social properties that Meta has, and then of course, Google
with YouTube and their search business.
So they have advertising down. Those companies are doing great,
but Amazon's taking a bit different of an approach.
Amazon, of course, has their online retail business number
one in the world, and they're infusing a lot of that with
sponsored ads. Retail advertising is still
early on. This is something that's not yet
highly optimized, even though it already has super high margins.
This is going to be a category that continues to grow when we
filter about everything else but just the advertising.
This is growing near 20%. They're also advertising on
Prime Video. That's probably the next biggest
way. They're advertising on Twitch.
They're advertising on all these different channels, and Amazon
is getting better and more effective with their ads, just
like Google and Meta did. I'll note that Meta and Google
have grown their ad revenue for a year and years and years, far
beyond what most people predicted.
And I believe that Amazon is in the early innings of their
advertising growth. It's growing at 20% today.
And I think they'll be able to keep this up for long into the
future. They have so many avenues of
growing their advertising, and they're even making it so that
advertisers on Amazon can now pay to have ads on Netflix.
They're brokering these ads with their advertiser base.
This is a very good position for Amazon to be in.
And #5 of why I believe Amazon is a great pick today is because
of the logistics network. Logistics requires scale.
It requires more volume. The more volume you have, the
more products you're selling, the more things are moving, the
easier you can scale logistics. And at the more cost efficiency
you can scale logistics. So in terms of cost structure,
the biggest company wins in logistics.
Amazon has the number one online retail store.
They're selling comparable amounts to to Walmart and
they're doing so with this massive logistics business.
In fact, Amazon logistics is so big now, they basically built
out their own UPS and FedEx and DoorDash combined.
It is incredible. And what they're doing with this
is again, like Amazon does, they build it for themselves and then
they sell it to other people. And that's exactly what they're
doing in logistics. We have news here that Amazon
adds Walmart, Shopify Sheen to multi channel fulfillment
coverage where they basically do everything in terms of
logistics. And the big companies that
they're adding here is Shopify, which is a a big one.
That's a big one for Amazon. Shopify previously tried to
build their own Amazon fulfillment network and they cut
that out early. They decided that was a no go,
way too expensive, way too much cap back.
Now they're relying on Amazon. They're becoming partners with
them along with Walmart, which of course is a huge win and
Sheen. Amazon, meanwhile, is being
extremely aggressive with this. They're planning to launch in
quote, every major manufacturing location, so Amazon's just going
everywhere. They want to be the dominant
concentrated winner in logistics and scale creates further scale
with this. Remember, you need volume to do
this on a cost effective basis. Amazon has that volume.
Amazon's dominant unique foothold in logistics, which is
incredibly costly and it takes a long time to replicate and build
out, is another tool in their vast tool chest to be able to
have excess returns over the next five years.
It's another thing that they can leverage.
So when I look at Amazon, this story of AWS growth, millions of
customers using it, robotics and automation, making the company
more efficient, their massive Prime ecosystem, the long
lifetime customer value, the huge advertising business
they're building, and the logistics network.
I just love this stock. I think it's one of the best
ones in the market. Now having said that, it doesn't
mean that it's going to go up tomorrow.
We've seen this many times before.
We can't control for short time trades and the fluctuations and
volatility of a stock, but we can control when we buy a
company. We can control ourselves of when
we buy and when we sell. I've been using opportune times
to buy Amazon stock. The tariff dip and when the
company dips down for no good reason, I believe are great
times to buy this stock. Right now I have $133,000 of the
company, 40,500 in gains, and I believe it's just getting
started. I'd like to see this eventually
become a 200 three $100,000 position from gains, lifting it
alone. So I'm super bullish on it.
I think it's going to do great, but we'll have to wait in the
sea. There's no guarantees in
investing. Anything can happen, but that's
my thesis. Now, moving on, we get to the
return of Jimmy Kimmel's show back on the ABC.
We know about a week ago, there's a lot of controversy
when his show was suddenly pulled after some indirect
pressure from the FCC and the big wigs at Disney deciding that
what he said was both inaccurate and insensitive, they decided to
pull his show. Now, this has caused a huge stir
of arguments for freedom of speech or the responsibility of
businesses, the differences between public broadcast radio
and private channels and so on and so forth.
I covered the whole issue and a lot of detail in a previous
episode that you can look up. But what's happened since then?
In only a few days, ABC or Disney has decided to bring back
his show, and with it, the return of Jimmy Kimmel.
Now a lot of people were waiting to know what he was going to
say. In fact, this is probably the
most anticipated monologue of the year.
He was fired and rehired within a week.
How is Jimmy Kimmel going to address this controversy?
What is he going to say? It's a very interesting thing.
Most people are curious about what he was going to say.
Was he going to be apologetic? Was he going to correct things?
Was he going to be more indignant and double down?
What is he going to do in this monologue?
So this is likely, I believe, one of the most anticipated
monologues of the year. I think it's probably Jimmy
Kimmel's most watched episode in probably the past five years.
He really probably has more attention now than ever before.
And I want to highlight how he responded to this controversy.
And during the monologue, this is the part where he addressed
his previous monologue that got him kicked off the air.
Hearing a lot about what I need to say and do tonight, and the
truth is, I don't think what I have to say is going to make
much of a difference. If you like me, like me.
If you don't, you don't. I have no illusions about
changing anyone's mind, but I do want to make something clear
because it's important to me as a human.
And that is, you understand that it was never my intention to
make light of the murder of a young man.
I don't, I don't think there's anything funny about it.
I posted a message on Instagram of the day he was killed sending
love to his family and asking for compassion.
And I meant it and I still do. Nor was it my intention to blame
any specific group for the actions of what it was obviously
a deeply disturbed individual. That was really the opposite of
the point I was trying to make. But I understand that to some
that felt either I'll timed or unclear or maybe both.
And for those who think I did point a finger, I get why you're
upset. If the situation was reversed,
there's a good chance I'd have felt the same way.
I have many friends. That was his basic address of
the controversy, and there's a couple different ways to look at
this. He didn't exactly say I'm sorry,
he didn't say those specific words.
He didn't say what I said was wrong, but he did clarify.
And I think that this is about as close to an apology you're
going to get from Jimmy Kimmel. I don't think that he was ever
going to come out and say I was wrong.
I apologize. But what I see here is a
roundabout way of saying what I said was dumb.
It's a roundabout way of apologizing.
It's kind of a way of apologizing while trying to save
face. You're not exactly saying the
words. I'm sorry.
But he's definitely walking back what he said.
He's walking it back to a huge degree.
He's trying to to really correct and kind of give clarity to how
he really feels about the situation.
So I thought that this was about as good of a response as Jimmy
Kimmel could give given the situation.
I think it sounded at least sincere.
At the end of the episode. He also did more of a tribute to
Erica Kirk a moment. Over the weekend, a very
beautiful moment. I don't know if you saw this on
Sunday. Erica Kirk forgave the man who
shot her husband. She forgave him.
That is an example we should follow if you believe in the
teachings of Jesus, as I do. There it was.
That's that's it. A selfless act of grace,
forgiveness from a grieving widow.
It touched me deeply and I hope it it touches many.
And if there's anything we should take from this tragedy to
carry forward, I hope it can be that.
So there's multiple mentions of this event.
He's taking the tragedy a lot more serious in this return.
So there you have him addressing this controversy, I think in
about as good of a way as he could.
You could have came out and just straight up apologized.
But again, it's Jimmy Kimmel. I think he did walk it back, and
he does seem sincere. We also have at the same time
this continued theme of censorship.
We have YouTube admitting that they banned thousands, if not
millions of accounts for COVID-19 misinformation or
election misinformation. So during that time period in
2020, people could post things on YouTube.
If they deemed it as false or misinformation, they would ban
your channel permanently. Now YouTube's reversing these
bans, YouTube says quote today, YouTube's community guidelines
allow for a wider range of content regarding COVID and
election integrity. YouTube wrote on X that it will
be a limited pilot project open to a subset of creators, as well
as channels that were terminated under the policies that the
company has since retired. Among the previously banned
under those rules, we're the associate of the deputy FBI
director Dan Bongino. We have former Trump chief
strategist Steve Bannon. We have the Health and Human
Services secretary Rob F Kennedy Junior.
It's not clear if those channels will be reinstated, but those
were some of the biggest ones that were banned.
YouTube also said it's no longer going to empower third party
fact checkers to moderate content and will continue to
enable free speech on the platform.
So in a lot of cases, the third party fact checkers have been
accused of being biased. They can say that this is not a
fact when it's really just a political view they don't like.
Therefore these channels get banned.
And therein lies the problem and why YouTube's changing its
policy. In fact, YouTube is following
very similarly the policy on X or Twitter today, which is a
feature that will display information panels with links to
independent fact checks under the video.
If someone makes some crazy claim or something that's
medically inaccurate or you know, some other inaccurate
information, rather than just banning their channel outright,
you'll have further context underneath.
You'll have the counter argument right underneath the video.
Overall, I think this is the right direction for Google to go
to reinstate these accounts to allow people to express their
opinions even if they're wrong or they're misinformation or
they're dumb. It's better than going down the
route of someone unilaterally banning these accounts and
making them so people can't see them.
I posted on X that I believe it was the right thing for Jimmy
Kimmel's show to return. That way the market can judge
it. The free market.
If you don't like Jimmy Kimmel, you don't have to watch them.
Just like these YouTube channels.
If you don't like what these channels are saying, you can
vote with your feet, with your eyes.
You don't need to give them views.
So in this case, I think it's better to have more information,
more context, more debate, and less censorship, less top down
management, less banning of accounts or deplatforming
people. Now finally, we get to a new
appearance of Mark Mahaney, an analyst that I very much like.
Mark Mahaney explains his thesis on Netflix and why he believes
the stock is going to rise 20% from a share price of $1200 per
share. Let's go ahead and take a look
at his thesis. There was an anticipation in the
trade year to date that we were going to have a heck of a strong
content slate in the back half the year.
I think that's coming through. And I think there's a little bit
of surprise in this, this drama that everybody's now loved in
its most popular movie, I guess of all time.
K Pop Demon Hunters. But you still have, you still
have Carl. Don't forget, you still got
Stranger Things. And it's coming out in three
batches. So this is going to keep you
busy, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's.
And then I think the contents that will just continue to get
stronger. I think the next move in the
stock is going to be based on them ramping up advertising
revenue. I think they're going to do it,
but this is going to be a long slog.
And then also getting more and more into live events, including
sports. And I think we're going to see
that. I think Netflix is just going to
become more crucial, more essential to households around
the world over the next two to three years.
It's a really good asset. You want to be long it.
This is not an aggressive entry point.
But if you don't own any, you should buy some I think and look
for those big pull backs to step in and take big positions.
I like Netflix as a core franchise.
I'm actually surprised about how bullish he is here.
I've owned Netflix for so long, and when a stock just goes up
and up and up and up, you get anchored to certain price
points. You think, jeez, am I really
going to buy more of this company?
But here he is avoiding the anchoring bias.
Even though Netflix is up 30 some odd percent this year, it's
up big last year, the year before, the year before.
Netflix has been such an incredible performer.
He believes there's more to go with this company.
So in his thesis, he sees sustained 20% or greater
earnings per share growth for Netflix over the next five
years. Incredibly rapid growth from a
high quality asset. And I, of course, agree.
Netflix continues to be my number one or two position in
the story fund. Now that's going to be it for
this time. Hope you enjoyed.
See you in the next one.