Analysts Were Completely Wrong About This Stock

Added: 2026-05-13

[00:00:00]Today on the Joseph Carlson show, Google's almost at $400 per share. Set another all-time high. It's up a couple percentage points today. Google cannot stop winning. This is one of the most incredible stocks that I've ever seen.

[00:00:12]Over the past one year, just the past one year, Google's up 155%.

[00:00:19]It's absolutely astonishing what this company has accomplished. And it's been led by Sundar Pachai, possibly one of the most misunderstood CEOs in the business. We'll be looking at how investors analyze companies through culture, and how many analysts missed Google's culture, what they got wrong in this situation, and why the stock continues to win. We also have a lot of business leaders and investors going on to TV in long format interviews. We have Brad Gersonner laying out what he believes is happening in this AI tech battle. We have Dario Amade, the CEO of Anthropic, giving more and more warnings about software companies and how many businesses will be displaced, many jobs will be lost. This is more of the rhetoric that we've seen from Daario giving scary warnings about AI, but this seems to be balanced with Jensen. Jensen went on addressing many of the specific claims that Daario is making and he gives his reaction of why he has a completely different opinion. We'll be discussing who's right. Then, of course, we have Bill Aman and many others. So, we're going to be going through all of those interviews. I'll be giving you my take on them as well as we have some companies that have recently reported earnings. Duolingo is one of them. I'll be giving my thoughts on Dolingo. And then in this fail of the week, we have Zuron Mandani getting into a battle with Ken Griffin from Citadel. He made a Tik Tok-like video pointing specifically at Griffin's house, saying that he's going to tax the rich, and Ken Griffin has responded. We'll be looking over Ken Griffin's entire response and the type of dynamic that this is creating in the fail of the week. Now, to start things off, we have to look at the rise of Google. This stock continues to win almost every single day. When we look at the reason it's going up today, well, it has something to do with this news that Anthropic is investing $200 billion into Google. They say that Anthropic has committed to spend $200 billion with Google Cloud over 5 years as part of the recent agreement. So, one of the metrics we can look at when we're looking at Google is that RPO cloud backlog. And this is where we get to the numbers that almost look fake by how much they're growing. You can see the long-term history. You have a steady growth rate.

[00:02:16]And then over the just the past couple of quarters, it's doubled and doubled again. In this most recent case, in Q4 of 2025, it went from 240 billion to 460 billion. But of this, the majority of this incremental leap was a massive contract signed from Anthropic, adding on $200 billion. So that $200 billion from Anthropic is included in this $460 billion. Now these numbers that OpenAI and Enthropic are committing to the cloud providers are massive and that's what causes some analysts some concern.

[00:02:48]Contracts involving Enthropic and OpenAI now account for more than half of the two trillion in backlogs at the major cloud providers. This concentration risk from OpenAI and Enthropic seems to be fading away as the compute is real and the demand continues to keep up. We've seen Google continue to win. In fact, when we look at this stock performance and the way that the market is now treating this, we can simply look at Google's performance over the trailing one year compared to the other big tech companies. Google's up 157% over the past year. Nvidia is the next closest.

[00:03:22]It's up 74%. Meta is only up 3%, so it's barely moved over the past 1 year.

[00:03:27]Microsoft is actually down 4%. And Amazon is up 45%. So, Amazon's done great. Uh, Nvidia has done extraordinary and Google has done out of thisorld good. It's doubled the performance of Nvidia over the past year. Now it may become the biggest company in the world.

[00:03:43]It's right there with Nvidia. And it seems like this happened so fast. If we rewind just a little bit ago, Google was looked at as a company that had a culture problem. Remember those day in the life of a Google employee? playing in ball pits, eating endless food, playing foosball, hanging out around the campus, using the sleep pods, or just working from home and basically phoning in the job. That's how Google was viewed. It had a culture problem. Not only that, but the CEO of Google, Sundarbachai, he wasn't a strong leader.

[00:04:13]After all, look at the guy. It's kind of scrawny, right? Seems very timid. He's not trashtalking competitors. He's not saying that he's making anybody dance.

[00:04:21]He's not going on a X and making bold Twitter replies and gotchas to different people. Sundar was looked at as a weak leader, someone that didn't really know what he was doing. He was getting run over by the competition. Sundar is well spoken and articulate, but he's certainly not like Zuckerberg. He's not like Elon Musk at all. They're very different personalities. And when you combine Sundar's personality with the perceived culture of Google being a rest and vest culture, you had a combination of a company that was viewed as just slacking off. To the extent that Chris Hone wrote a letter criticizing Google for its employee compensation, for its culture, saying that many of them needed to be fired and let go and the company needed to downsize. This was all in response to the perceived issues that were going on at Google. But at the time, nothing could have been further from the truth. Sundar was expertly executing on a decadesl long plan. He was building out Whimo. He knew that the technology was incredible. He knew it before investors did because he'd seen it firsthand. He was building the premier vertically integrated cloud with its own AI models embedded with its own TPUs. Now it's a massive growth path worth trillions of dollars. Sundar knew that the search business was fine. In fact, it wasn't only fine, it was being benefited by artificial intelligence. He was making it stronger, more engaging, making the product even more addicting to users while being better for advertisers. Sundar knew that YouTube was growing on the TV faster than any other platform, dominating television.

[00:05:50]No longer was it just a funny website that you use on your computer or your phone. YouTube is the biggest TV platform in the world. Sundar was building the best supercomputing system to ever exist all at the same time.

[00:06:03]There was no real culture problem at Google. The employee pay can be argued, but does anybody care about that anymore with them generating record profits? Is there still a culture problem or an employee compensation problem? Does anybody care if there's massage therapists on the campus anymore? No.

[00:06:21]All of those concerns have faded away and Sundar Pachai has gone from a timid weak CEO to now someone that's crafted one of the most incredible companies in the world that is on the forefront in winning in every single business line that they operate in. And the big tell from all of this, it wasn't in how Sundar spoke. It wasn't in the jacket that he wore. It wasn't in the day in the life videos. The way that you could tell that Google was making a comeback, the real way that you could get some insight into it was through the earnings reports. That was a big tell. That was a big secret from Google. This whole time, every single earnings report going back quarter after quarter was amazing. Every single one of them. Whether the stock sold off afterwards or not, Google posted continually incredible numbers.

[00:07:06]You can check the math here. You can go back and look. It's all public record.

[00:07:11]look at the earnings reports and every single one of them was incredible and they continue to get more incredible and his execution continues to pay dividends today. My position in Google is now close to a4 million with $137,000 in gains. It's been one incredible ride and as of right now I'm still not selling a share. Now let's go ahead and move on to some news. Now first we have the investor Brad Gersonner going on to an interview to explain where he's putting his money and how he sees this AI landscape shifting over time. He starts off by addressing the central question of whether or not all this capex spend is worth it. Now Brad and I have been both on the side where we believe that the capex spend from these companies, the big cloud providers, the big companies including Meta are going to be worth it. I think it's going to be an attractive return on investment. And that is a controversial opinion. Not everyone agrees with it. In fact, there's many notable investors, ones like Michael Bur who do not believe that this capex band will be attractive.

[00:08:07]There's ones that have said that they're going to have low returns, that it's going to be like telecom laying out landlines. They're going to go down afterwards. Their margins will compress.

[00:08:16]They'll no longer have the same attractive business model as a software company that they previously had. We've heard many of the bare cases. But now it seems like the tides are shifting and the bulls are starting to win. When you look at Brad Gersonner, he highlights why this is happening. would AI revenue show up to justify these legendary spending levels by the MAG 5? This year we're going to have 800 billion in total capex by the MAG 5 and the question was would there be revenues to justify that?

[00:08:45]And what we saw over the course of the last month were two things. Number one, the the market got comfortable that we were going to get past the geopolitical concerns in Iran and the strait. And number two, they saw the revenue showing up from the hyperscalers. The first thing that he mentions is that the market does have to work its way past the war. That's a big shock. Any type of conflict like this is a shock. But once the market realizes or at least draws the conclusions that it will eventually come to a conclusion and an end, then the market can move past it. And the next thing that he goes into is AI revenue acceleration at tremendous scale from the hyperscalers. 28% revenue growth out of Amazon at tremendous scale or 39% for Azure, 63% for Google.

[00:09:27]Extraordinary. And of course, Anthropic is adding revenues at rates we've never seen before, by the way. And so is OpenAI. And so the the question as to whether or not the revenues would show up to justify this level of spending has been answered answered very loudly, at least for the moment. But listen, part of the reason we're still hanging out at market multiples or in the case of Nvidia, way below market multiples, is there's a wall of worry. Will the revenues continue? Are they durable? Are the margins going to be high enough to justify, you know, the return on investment? Those questions have to be answered. I certainly feel strongly that they will be answered in the affirmative. But that's the reason we don't have a bubble and we're not running away with super high, you know, multiples in excess of the market.

[00:10:10]>> So he believes that right now the early indicators are clear. We have companies like Amazon reacelerating big time. AWS growth, high teens revenue growth. Even as big as Amazon is, the revenue is accelerating. We see the same thing with Microsoft. We see the same thing with Google. Once we see better return on investment, a slowdown or a deceleration in capex, and a continued growth in revenue, I believe that these companies are going to be rated even higher. I've said this before, but I think that Google has already gotten to a high multiple. It's at a 30 plus Ford PE now at like a 32. That's right where Google belongs. It's one of the strongest companies in the world. It deserves above 30 PE ratio. Microsoft is now in the low 20s. Anytime that's been the case, Microsoft has been a good buy and we're likely to see Microsoft's forward PE creep up to a 26. It has a lot of room to expand. We have Amazon, which is now at around a 27 to 30 forward PE ratio. Amazon's earnings growth are so fast that it doesn't even need to grow its PE to be an attractive buy, but it likely will anyways. And then we have Meta, the one that's left out the most.

[00:11:13]It's at a 24 PE ratio. This company has a lot of room for multiple expansion. If Meta is viewed more favorably at all, it'll be a massively attractive buy here. So, there is more room for these companies to rise, for the multiples to expand. And if we see attractive returns on these investments, which I agree with Brad, I think we will, we should see the valuations of these companies rise. Now, Brad continues on to lay out the case of all these companies involved in the AI race and how each of them are positioned today.

[00:11:42]>> All of those companies are doing extraordinary things. Let me just give you a statistic. It's just eight quarters ago that collectively they were doing $150 billion in revenue. Now they're doing $350 billion in revenue.

[00:11:56]They are growing tremendously faster than what the consensus expectations were just a few quarters ago. I think all of those companies are going to do great. Certainly people are asking the question about Meta. You're spending all this money on capex. What do we get for it? Right? So they're going to have to show continued acceleration. They're going to have to continue to do the things to maintain margin. You know, they they've talked about how they're going to continue to get fit, to tighten the belt, to make sure that the margins pay for what the the the returns that we're getting. But I'll tell you this, if I know Mark Zuckerberg and team, they're going to deliver some great models and some great products, uh, productivity for the consumer, entertainment for the consumer later this year. I think it will continue to perform well. But listen, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have tangible returns. their cloud revenues are accelerating at scale. We thought Amazon was best positioned um you you know for a lot of reasons partly because it had underperformed partly because of tranium um but they're really just doing an incredible job now major shareholders of both anthropic and open AAI open AAI about ready to distribute all of their models across AWS which we think will help accelerate open AI. Um but clearly Google with its TPUs its cloud uh you know uh services is benefiting tremendously from what's going on in AI.

[00:13:14]Two years ago, Brad Gersonner went on to CNBC and he seemed somewhat bearish on Google. His interview, that was my takeaway. Maybe he had a small position in it, I don't know. But overall, the takeaway that he had on CNBC, most people, was that this guy is concerned about Google because he talked about Open AI and how they're beating them at their own game, how Google was a 10 blue link economy company, how everything's changing and they're going to have to win at the same monopoly that they had before, and on and on. We've heard the same thing. So, here he is addressing this a couple years later with Google being the astronomical performer over that time. And here's his updated thoughts on Google.

[00:13:49]>> I was on here two years ago and I said, "Listen, Google is suspect because 10 blue links is going to get displaced by the answers of AI. They grew search revenues 19% in the quarter, way higher than we forecast a couple years ago.

[00:14:04]Google search has grown much faster than most investors anticipated. Faster even more with AI than it was previously.

[00:14:11]monetizing even better with AI than it was previously having a bigger percentage of queries being commercialized than even before with the 10 blue link system. So Google in every way the search business is better than it was before. The reality is this moment because the rate of change is so high. Scott, you have to maintain your mental flexibility. But I don't think you you're well served by trying to day trade this. You'll get whipsawed.

[00:14:35]>> Brad is 100% correct here. This is the type of thing where you get behind these companies. You buy them at reasonable valuations and you simply hold. Hold through all the volatility. Hold through all the economic uncertainties. Hold through all the reports of them spending a lot of money on capex. Hold through the earnings reports when the stock drops 10%. All of this type of stuff is routine. Being able to hold through it is where you get the returns. Now, lastly, he mentions his top pick right now, which is Nvidia. This is one of his most significant bets, and he believes that the stock is simply just undervalued today based off of the multiples. Um, but I think Nvidia is terribly uh underowned. I think it's terribly uh undervalued today and so we're happy to sit in that and to own it.

[00:15:15]>> With the low 20 Ford PE, it is difficult to see how you lose with Nvidia here.

[00:15:19]Now, Brad Gersonner is not the only one to have recently done an interview. We also have Daario Amade. We have Jamie Diamond both warning about the potential disruption and impacts of AI. And this is nothing new for Daario, the CEO of Anthropic, has warned about AI many times, saying that many software companies are going to be blindsided.

[00:15:36]they're going to go out of business.

[00:15:37]Here's his comments.

[00:15:38]>> Individual SAS companies, it's very possible for them to lose market value, go bankrupt, completely go bust, but but it it it depends on on the response, right? I think there are incumbents today that are going to see very clearly we have a lot of moat here. Uh uh the moes here are going away. We're really going to pivot and we'll do better than we did before. and there are others who are not going to pay attention, who are going to be blindsided and uh you know they're gonna have a really bad time.

[00:16:06]>> Now that's a lot more nuanced and correct of a take from Daario. He highlights that some businesses in the SAS category will be disrupted, especially the ones that don't evolve, especially the ones that just sit on their current business model, but many of them will look at where they have a mo and they'll evolve and they'll become even stronger. This is a little bit of a difference, in fact, a big difference from where Daario was a bit ago where he was saying that lots of developers are going to lose their jobs. There's going to be massive net unemployment. Lots of entry-level people entering the job force. Well, you're doomed. You're not going to be able to find a job. AI's taken all of them. That was the Dario that we were getting before, and it seems like it's changing a little bit.

[00:16:44]But we have other executives, other leaders in the AI category that have a front row seat as well. just as good of a view of this as Daario. They have a completely different perspective and they've held a different perspective the entire time. Jensen being one of them.

[00:16:57]Jensen is someone that is much more on the bullish side of AI for both his company and the overall economy. He believes that artificial intelligence will create more jobs far more than it destroys. And this is the same side that I've been on this entire time. I've had argument after argument explaining to people that when a highly productive technology comes into the economy, when it makes people work better, when it makes people be able to do tasks they otherwise could not do, that is job accreative, it creates jobs, it raises wages, it makes employees more valuable, it makes more employees be able to be more nimble and do things they otherwise couldn't do. Some of the things that you could point to as being the biggest areas where there'll be job loss like some of the specific things that AI should automate, it's not even happening in those categories. For example, AI can code. It can code really well. It can write entire websites worth of code very quickly, thousands of lines of code without a single error. But we don't see a net job loss in software developers at all right now. And Jensen highlights more examples of this. But we have to be careful that if we scare people, we're actually hurting us. So, let me give you a tangible example.

[00:18:09]>> Okay, >> a tangible example, and this is the one that it was the first prediction.

[00:18:14]>> Um, a very very well-known, very important computer scientist said the first job that's going to be wiped out is radiology.

[00:18:22]>> And the reason for that is because computer vision does an incredible incredibly good job studying scans and looking at images and detecting things that we can't detect. Obviously it can.

[00:18:33]And so computer vision is now completely superhuman at that one narrow task. No human in the world can do a better job.

[00:18:41]Stay concentrated for as long, find an anomalies as small. And so today they're the computer scientist is absolutely right. A decade later 100% of radiology is now infiltrated by AI. It is completely integrated into radiology.

[00:18:58]And so that was completely right.

[00:19:00]However, what was completely wrong is that radiologists that job as predicted was not wiped out.

[00:19:09]And the reason for that surprisingly it's the opposite to them. To me is completely obvious. So what happened was radi >> I love how he highlights that to to him this wasn't a surprise but to other people that thought radiologists were going to lose their job this this came as a big surprise.

[00:19:28]ologists could now study more scans.

[00:19:30]They can take more patients. They could do more scans on the patients, diagnose disease better. They could accept more patients. The hospital is making more money. The radiology department is the best, one of the biggest profit generating centers. Now, as a result, they want to hire more radiologists.

[00:19:49]Now, if it turned out that everybody listened to him and the world has no radiologists, we would be short of this incredible critical resource. Now, one thing that Jensen leaves out that only strengthens his case here is there is a shortage of radiologists. Many people that were scared out of going into that field because it would become obsolete has now caused a massive shortage in radiologists. Their salaries are going skyhigh. There's job openings everywhere. There's lots of hospitals trying to hire them everywhere because there's not enough of them. And Jensen continues with this great example differentiating between a job and a task and how many people are seeing tasks be automated but not jobs. We should be telling radiologists your purpose in life is not to sit in a dark room to look at a workstation to study a scan.

[00:20:38]Your purpose in life is to work with doctors, help treat patients, to diagnose the disease, make people well. That's your purpose in life. Studying the scan is just a task you do. And so the fundamental thing that everybody is missing, all these computer scientists are going, "Yeah, that job is done. That job is done." Is that they misunderstand that the purpose of a job and the task of the job >> are related, not the same.

[00:21:05]>> Yeah. If you were to apply that to me, the task that I do 100% of the time is typing and talking and talking and typing are both completely automated and completely superhuman. I should be out of a job.

[00:21:20]>> So the message that Jensen sharing here, the message that Mark Zuckerberg shared on his earnings call, these positive views of AI need to be shared more by these leaders. Now, finally, we get to Bill Aman. He just recently went on an interview. He was asked about Meta in particular. Meta dropped around 10% after earnings. It had a negative reaction. So, what does Bill Aman make about this reaction? I >> I have a lot of confidence in Mark Zuckerberg. He's had been a pretty good uh excellent allocator of capital over time. Um people question his WhatsApp purchase. You go back in time all the various what looked like you know expensive outlays generally turned out okay.

[00:21:54]>> Yes.

[00:21:54]>> And uh I you know again we hear from the customers that they're getting better outcomes from meta-lated advertising.

[00:22:01]company talks about that this earning very attractive returns on investment.

[00:22:04]You know, we're we like companies that can earn high returns on capital and and are investing into that.

[00:22:11]>> Now, moving on, we get to some companies that just recently reported earnings.

[00:22:14]Dualingo is one of them. When I look at Dualingo, it's by far my worst investment that I've made so far. So, we're hitting new records both up and down. Google's the best investment I've ever made. Uh it's made $137,000 in gains just on that one investment. And then we have Dualingo, which it's in the story fund. I I knew that this company was a bit more volatile. It had potential to go down much further than most other companies. That's why I sized position rather small, but even as small as it is, Duelingo is now down $21,000.

[00:22:42]It's down around 50 60% at this point.

[00:22:45]And so, it's not ideal. Amongst a lot of other bets that have worked out, you can see most of them have gone in the right direction. Dualingo has continued to plummet. So, why am I not selling Dolingo? Well, some people may say it's because of ego. Maybe I just have too much ego. I'm not willing to accept a loss. Uh maybe I just have sunken cost fallacy. I've invested in the companies so I don't want to realize a loss. It's too difficult to do. And while those are all real things and in some cases they keep investors in bad stocks. I don't believe that's the case here. I don't feel any ego with Duolingo. In fact, I have sold some companies at a loss before. If I thought that Dolingo had a bad future, if things really were evolving in a way that I didn't like, I'd accept the loss, take the hit to the portfolio, and use the tax benefits and I'd move on from it. So, I don't have any concerns about ego or sunken cost concerns with Duolingo. The reason that I continue to invest in the stock today despite its enormous stock decline, is because I really just don't think things are all that bad. For example, when you look at Duolingo, the worst thing that you can come up with on these reports and the word of the day that you'll just hear over and over again anytime you hear someone talking about Dualingo is deceleration. Deceleration. It means that the growth rates have declined. The growth rates have declined. So, the multiple has compressed. And when we look at this, it's very real. For example, we see the daily active users.

[00:24:07]It decelerated from a growth rate of 40% down to a growth rate of 21%.

[00:24:13]That's deceleration. Meaning that if I did a growth rate chart, it would be up here and then it would decelerate down here. As the company's grown, the growth has slowown. And that is deceleration.

[00:24:24]And again, you'll just hear that word all over the place. The monthly active users, it's clearly decelerated. In fact, it's almost flatlined. You can see that year-over-year, they only gained 6% monthly active users. So, what gives? it looks like they've hit market saturation. Maybe the product isn't as good as AI competitors. Uh maybe there's just not that many people that want to learn want to learn languages and maybe they can't stick to it. There's all these concerns floating around. But in any case, the stock has decelerated. The company is growing slower than it was previously. Now, while that's true, I've been in this similar situation before.

[00:24:58]I've been investing for a while and many companies that I've invested in have decelerated at one point or another. Of course, the typical example of this is simply Netflix. We can take a look at Netflix's subscriber growth over time.

[00:25:12]This is a real chart. All the data is correct. And this shows you the red bars, which are their total subscribers every single quarter. And then the dotted line, which shows you the change in growth rate year-over-year from their subscriber growth. For example, back in 2014, Netflix was adding on subscribers at such a rate, it was growing at 34%.

[00:25:32]So hyper fast growth. investors were willing to pay almost anything for it.

[00:25:36]Then you can see throughout 2017 they were keeping that growth rate somewhat steady with some slight deceleration, right? 20 to 26% subscriber growth. Then you had in 2020 a big bump in subscriber growth. They gained 20 million subscribers in only a 3-month period.

[00:25:51]They grew up to 27% subscriber growth.

[00:25:55]See right here, 27%. This is right in 2020. But then what happened soon after that? Notice the bars stop going up quite as fast. The growth rate in subscribers starts to plummet. It goes from 27% down to 21 down to just 13.

[00:26:11]Then down to 8 8% growth in subscribers.

[00:26:15]Then to 5.5. They lost subscribers. Then they lost even more subscribers. 1 million subscriber loss. So Netflix wasn't only just decelerating. It was literally declining. It was a declining business back in 2022. And from that, investors drew a lot of conclusions. On Twitter, Netflix was pronounced dead.

[00:26:35]Now, I could go back and show you all the tweets. I have many of them saved because it was it was something else.

[00:26:41]Everybody left and right was saying that they knew this was going to happen, that Netflix is just getting out competed by YouTube, that uh Disney is going to beat them at their own game. Uh you had people celebrating the death of Netflix, mocking investors that were in the stock, saying, "How did you not see this coming?" It was fairly obvious. All these companies like Disney and HBO and all the rest are starting their own streaming services. Of course, Netflix isn't going to be able to grow like it was. It's hit its total addressable market. It's saturated. It has a product that is just a bunch of crummy shows.

[00:27:09]And on and on and on. The reaction was nearly unanimous. To be someone that even said anything remotely bullish about Netflix, you were a complete outsider at the time. There was no support for this stock. The stock price was at an all-time low. But what happened after this? Well, deceleration can only happen for so long if the business continues to adapt. If it's actually a decent product, the stock will continue to grow. From this point, Netflix did a password crackdown. They continue to invest in their content and they added on nearly 70 million subscribers. Now, they've added on well over a 100 million. In fact, Netflix has gone up almost 400% from this point of the lowest deceleration, the point of where they actually lost subscribers.

[00:27:50]This was the time to be buying the stock. The absolute best time in the past 10 years to buy the stock was at the period of time where it got the most criticism from the most people. So when people ask me, Joseph, are you gonna sell Duelingo because they have deceleration? I come from a background of not selling Netflix when they lost a million subscribers. Do you really think I'm going to sell a company that's just slowing down with its growth a little bit when I was unwilling to sell one when it was completely going downwards?

[00:28:19]Uh, in most cases, no. especially when I like the product, when I think it actually has a good future. Uh, it's not defiance, it's not ego, it's just my view of this company. When I look at Duolingo today, I actually view it in a much better position than Netflix was back in 2022. For example, Netflix literally lost a million subscribers.

[00:28:38]They were losing customers. And Dualingo's bad report this quarter was that they gained 21% daily active users.

[00:28:47]They gained 4 million daily active users in a three-month period, just sequentially from quarter to quarter.

[00:28:54]So, they're not even losing users.

[00:28:56]They're still growing rapidly. A 21% growth rate, by the way, if you just look at it in a vacuum and you forget about the deceleration. A 21% growth rate is actually pretty impressive.

[00:29:07]Dualingo's focus on their user growth and their product seems to be working.

[00:29:11]They continue to add on new daily active users. They're still figuring out the early stages of how to monetize it, how much to push on bookings. So revenue and total bookings are projected to grow slower than investors expect. And I expect that over this next year, things might be slow with Dualingo. I have no problem with that because I believe that there is opportunity here. One of the biggest criticisms of Dualingo is that you can't fully learn a language on it because after all, it's basically just flashcards. It's basically just tapping things. It doesn't get you to speak the language. It doesn't get you to pronunciate things correctly and therefore you can't really communicate just by Duallingingo alone. They mentioned that speaking practice has historically been the biggest gap for learners on Duallingingo and it's now a core part of the product and they say that over the past year the developments in this product has made it so that on the average video call users are speaking more than double the words.

[00:30:02]That's a massive improvement. They're getting users to talk longer and they're doing this through incredible advancements in the AI. The product is truly getting better. They've implemented three different speaking products like spoken tokens, flashcards where you have to rapidly repeat what the word is in the spoken language, and speaking adventures. Those are more gamified speaking adventures that they're doing. So, Dualingo users are now speaking far more. Overall, the entire goal here is to make Dolingo a product so good that it spreads by word of mouth. Now, they're growing users by 21%. If they can continue to do that for an extended period of time, they could literally get to hundreds of millions of users. So, while there's people talking about the PE ratio is at a 25 or a 30, I'm looking at this from a bigger scale.

[00:30:47]Dualingo is a $5 billion market cap company. It's a relatively small company. It's very volatile. The stock could go down to $2 billion market cap.

[00:30:56]It could go up to 10. It's a volatile company, but I like the goal of it. I like the user acquisition. I like the strategy from the leadership. But for now, it's simply a waiting game. Now, finally, we get to the fail of the week, which in this case is the battle between Zoron Mandani, the self-proclaimed socialist mayor of New York City, and Ken Griffin, who is, of course, a capitalist. And, well, they have a disagreement. Now, to start off the story, I just want to rewind a little bit to set the stage here. Going back all the way to 2020, we have a story from the New York Times, and this one's about a dinosaur. See, this dinosaur is named Stan. It was a T-Rex and it suddenly vanished from the United States. But T-Rexes are fairly large, so when they suddenly go missing, it's really easy to see where they end up. In October 2020, something that is not very easy to hide. The fossil of a 39 ft long Tyrannosaurus Rex, disappeared. The famous T-Rex known as Stan, named after his discover, was sold at auction at Christies for $31.8 million, shattering sales records. But the buyer was anonymous and little was heard about the fossil which worried paleontologists.

[00:32:02]They feared that the T-Rex had been purchased by a private owner who could deny access to researchers. Stan, this dinosaur has already contributed to critical studies about how his species bone healed after injuries and about how the pulverizing force that these dinosaurs can summon to crush bone. But on Wednesday, as reported by National Geographic, officials in Abu Dhabi announced that they were constructing a new natural history museum, and Stan would be one of the major attractions when it opens in several years. Now, Stan was found in South Dakota within the United States. That's Stan's home.

[00:32:37]Stan was in America 200 million years ago, but now Stan's not in America anymore. He's in Abu Dhabi. No longer do researchers have easy access to it. they have to in fact fly a full straight day and now they have limited access because they don't even own the dinosaur or have protections for it anymore. So this is a case of a private buyer or an entity from a foreign country buying a priceless artifact from the United States. And I think that this made a couple people within the United States take notice cuz we have a couple years later in 2024 we see this headline. Ken Griffin pays $45 million for a Stegosaurus. Now, this Stegosaurus, just like Stan, was originally found within the United States. That was its home in the Americas. Now, is this dinosaur really worth $45 million? Well, probably not. The 150 millionyear-old dinosaur nicknamed Apex was only expected to sell for up to $6 million. So, they think they're only going to get $6 million out of this, but there's a bidding war.

[00:33:36]There's a lot of entities bidding on this dinosaur remains. And Ken Griffin is the winner. Griffin, the 55-year-old founder and chief executive of Citadel, said that he aims to lend Apex to a museum in the United States. Quote, "Apex was born in America and is going to stay in America after the sale." And since that sale by Ken Griffin, Apex, the Stegosaurus, has remained within the United States, where he's home and has been home for the past 150 million years. He's now on display in a museum.

[00:34:06]And this was the first case of me becoming a little bit of a fan of Ken Griffin. After all, I like it when billionaires do things like this.

[00:34:13]There's a lot of ways they could spend their money or their time, but preserving priceless artifacts and fossils from being siphoned out of the country where they're home to, flown off to the Middle East or Abu Dhabi or some other nation. I think is a good use of billionaires money. I think that more of them should do stuff like this. Protect these artifacts for American citizens.

[00:34:34]Use the capital that you made from this country to benefit the people here. So, after Ken Griffin did this unapologetically patriotic act of keeping this dinosaur hair, I became a little bit of a fan of him. But then we see Ken Griffin later on get highlighted by Zoron Mandani, who is not as much of a fan of Ken Griffin. and he made that known to the world when he released this kind of trendy social media video that basically shows Ken Griffin's home and at the same time paints him as a little bit of a bad guy for being so wealthy and owning more than one house. Let's go ahead and just take a look at this ad here. This is the ad that the New York mayor released. When I ran for mayor, I said I was going to tax the rich.

[00:35:18]So, I just want to pause there. Uh this is real. This is a a real ad by the mayor of New York City leaning in until he's about two inches from the glass and and tapping the camera lens. This is this is the type of leadership we're getting now.

[00:35:33]>> This is an annual fee on luxury properties worth more than $5 million whose owners do not live full-time in the city like for this penthouse which hedge fund CEO Ken.

[00:35:43]>> In this video, he specifically outs Ken Griffin. He specifically highlights him as an example of the bad billionaire that paid a lot of money for real estate in Manhattan. It continues on saying that Ken Griffin doesn't even spend full-time in the house. Ken Griffin is one of the most valuable assets to New York City. He employs 2,300 people. He's one of the biggest, most influential figures in finance, which New York City is the financial capital of the world.

[00:36:09]Citadel and its employees have paid over $2.3 billion in taxes to New York City.

[00:36:15]It's one of the biggest tax contributors to actually exist in New York. And this type of video paints him as a bad guy.

[00:36:23]Outlines his home in particular. So, I was waiting to see what type of reaction Ken would have when he sees this video, which surely he will because it was a hyper viral video by Zoron. What is Ken going to do? What is his reaction? Is he just going to ignore it or will he eventually address it? And well, as of yesterday, he addressed it.

[00:36:40]>> Um, so how did you feel about the the mayor's little video?

[00:36:46]Um, it was creepy and weird.

[00:36:50]>> Agreed. I >> I mean like knock knock on the window.

[00:36:53]Like, huh?

[00:36:56]>> Mayor of New York City on the screen.

[00:36:57]Yeah.

[00:36:58]>> Yeah. On the screen. Like >> that.

[00:36:59]>> How many times have you watched that video?

[00:37:01]>> A three.

[00:37:02]>> Three.

[00:37:04]>> I It couldn't help myself.

[00:37:07]>> You had to What?

[00:37:07]>> I had to go back and look at it again. I mean, like, you literally looked at the first time and you're like, you you got to be kidding me. Okay. And then the second time you're like, you know what?

[00:37:16]This is actually this has gone from creepy to actually not really creepy.

[00:37:19]This has gone frightening. Because >> one thing I think is often missed is you assume sometimes I think people do that if you have like billions of dollars that somehow you're not human anymore, you don't have normal experiences. But it still must be really weird to have the mayor of New York City pointing a video camera at your house and and making a whole social media post about your at your home when he did nothing to really prompt this. Like Ken Griffin didn't do anything. He didn't have any commentary. He didn't say anything about Zoron before this as far as I can recall. It just randomly happened. So, it has to be an odd experience and especially a little bit of a frightening one.

[00:37:53]>> Okay. And then the second time you're like, you know what, this is actually this has gone from creepy to actually not really creepy. This has gone frightening because you know the CEO of United Healthcare was killed just a few blocks from my house. And anything that creates like an agitation in the extremist on either side of the aisle is a frightening dynamic.

[00:38:13]>> You're bailing.

[00:38:15]>> So, so what do we do at 350 is is is a still a point of discussion internally.

[00:38:21]But what is no longer a point of discussion is that Miami is now, you know, one of the when when we moved from Chicago, there was a debate between New York and Miami.

[00:38:30]It's unquestionably true that we made the right choice. I'll leave it at that. It's unquestionably true that we made the right choice. And now, and now what the mayor of New York has made clear to my partners and principally my New York partners, my New York partners, is that we need to double down on our bet in Miami because we want to be in a state that embraces that embraces business, that embraces education, that embraces personal freedom and liberty, and that embraces people having an opportunity to live the American dream and a dream of earned success. death, not a dream of redistributive handouts that leave people dependent on government for their lives and their livelihoods in a way that takes away dignity and honor.

[00:39:21]>> And so you can see the change happening in Lifetime. Miami is the big winner here as New York loses. And this is one of the cases where I think it's unfortunate because not everything that Zoron's trying to do is bad. Raising more taxes is not inherently a bad thing. And there's other ways he could have gone about this that are less resentful and less targeted at specific individuals. Portraying your biggest taxpayers as being the bad guy is of course going to make them feel unwelcome and they have options to move. Zuron can raise taxes in a much less resentful way. There's many other ways to accomplish the same goal without this type of animosity, without this type of result. So I view this whole situation as one of the biggest fails that I've seen. New York is now signaling to wealthy individuals that you are not welcome there, that your business is not welcome there, that the leaders and the politicians will portray you as a bad guy, taking advantage of the system.

[00:40:11]While at the same time, Miami is opening their arms for business, receiving more and more employees, more capital, more more development, more investment, more taxpayer revenue. This is one of the biggest unforced errors that I've seen, and that is why it is the fail of the week. That's all for this time. See you in the next one.