SPEAKER_01 0:00

Justin, the sky is falling, and I'm hoping that you can save us from catch it. Yeah, yes. I'll try my best to catch it.

SPEAKER_02 0:10

It's just closed. Uh, but go ahead. What were we gonna say? No, it's funny because I'm we're we're reading some of the live comments and they're a little negative. And I was saying, like, I don't think either of us are feeling that negative about the market, even though everything is down in red.

SPEAKER_01 0:27

Yeah, and and in the last 15 minutes is like extra. Like the barque is like, let's see how how quickly we can make things crash even further. Fascinating place to be. Yeah, it's good to be able to laugh about it though.

SPEAKER_02 0:42

I think so. I mean, the the fact that we're long-term investors, we don't need any of the the money today. It's easy to just kind of watch, or it makes it easier to watch the portfolios go down and view it more as a buying opportunity uh than anything else, or just a detour.

SPEAKER_01 1:00

Yeah, and then you you know, not being on margin, having some cash balance, all of those things are super helpful. Um, but we have a packed agenda. What's our what's our agenda to do? We do. Well, this is episode 50. We need to call that out. It's a big 5-0. One year. So 52 weeks ago is when we started. Actually, it might be 51 week. We may have started a week into August, right? But but technically I think we started in August. Yeah. Yeah. Um, but technically we skipped two weeks of doing the episodes for Christmas and New Year, and this would be our 52nd episode if we had, you know, like maintained that. But 50 episodes is pretty awesome.

SPEAKER_02 1:40

Um, yeah. Surprised we got here. Hopefully, we'll get to another 50, maybe even another 100. Yeah, it's been fun doing it so far, so I'm I'm enjoying it. It has been. Um, it's also funny, and I think I've maybe mentioned this once before, but like I remember when we were first doing the podcast, like I'd be sweating a little bit, you know, it's a little nerve-wracking before you go live. And now it's just like, okay, let's just start this thing. I don't even know what we're talking about. Um, speaking of that, what are we talking about? So you made two purchases in the same stock this week. I wonder what it was. Uh CXMT IPO'd in the Chinese markets. Uh, did that have any effect on Micron? Who knows? Uh, we have some big earnings today, Meta, Hood, and Microsoft. And then we have a big earnings tomorrow, um, specifically for us, Ribbian. And then I want to look at your portfolio in particular in a different angle, uh, using some new savvy trader features that we recently released. And as always, we have listener questions. Um we could also talk about uh the market dropping a bit more and maybe like uh interest rates if you want to go there.

SPEAKER_01 2:57

Because I know we were we were just talking about well interest rates were uh uh unchanged, right? So uh they held them. That is surprising that the market decided to sort of crash after that unchanged days because there was some speculation that interest rates were about to be increased due to inflation or to control inflation, but that didn't happen. Um but yeah, so we could probably skip the macro. I mean, we're not macro people, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 3:23

You don't like the macro. Yes, yeah, and but and you know, tomorrow it'll all be resolved anyway, so it's fine. Right. Exactly. Um okay, so what was the stock that you uh bought this week?

SPEAKER_01 3:37

Micron, of course. Uh so if you remember, I did three tranches of sales totaling roughly 7.5% of my micron holding. I had sold it in two and a half percent increments. I'm basically buying back those same shares that I sold between 1,050, I think, and 1200 bucks. Uh, I'm now buying them back. I bought yesterday I bought some in the 800s, and today I bought some in like I think it was like 760 or something like that. Um so two of those three tranches have been purchased back because I missed them. Those shares left me and I missed them. I wanted to have them back. So um, and and uh who knows if the if the price continues to crash as it has been, uh, I might buy that third uh third tranche. Now what's fascinating about uh Micron's price crashing is the circumstances under which it's crashing, so which absolutely are mind-boggling to me. Uh, one of those circumstances is CXMT, as you just mentioned, Chinese memory maker going public in the Chinese stock market. And the Chinese investors decided this is the most valuable company in China and wrote that company to over a $500 billion valuation, which is absolutely incredible. It's awesome. They have the right mindset. Memory is super important. They kind of are validating the fact that memory is super important. Um, and it turns out that CXMT has roughly an 8% market share of memory of the DRAM uh uh market. Um so then then the question is um it, you know, if 8% of the uh DRAM market uh is worth $500 billion, how much is 22% of the DRAM market, which is what Micron has uh worth? And if you just extrapolate it, uh you know it's at least worth 1.4 trillion. You know, so uh so that that's like one particular uh viewpoint on it. And if you do, you know, $1.4 trillion would be roughly at $1,250 uh per share price for Micron. Uh that's just on this DRAM uh market share, but then Micron has more advanced memory and they have the uh AI high bandwidth memory that um CXMT and others can't, or uh the other makers besides CXMT, Samsung and uh SKHinex are not there yet. So um CXMT can't make these memory chips that uh Samsung, Micron, and SK Hinex can uh for AI usage. So you you know that's fascinating. Like why should this stock be hit as opposed to go up because of the CXMT um uh IPL? Makes no sense. So at least to me, it makes no sense. So that's one of the reasons it went down. Then um then another reason was that um Google reported as as you know last uh last week, and they crushed it. They they crushed it on revenue growth, they crushed it on uh EPS. Now, part of their EPS was due to one-time uh profits from um the SpaceX IPO because they own a big chunk of SpaceX. So, but it overall they crushed it. Now, what's the reason that Google crashed and uh uh the uh earnings were viewed negatively? It's because for the first time Google actually had negative cash flows. So despite having record profits, because they're deciding that hey, AI is pretty important and they're gonna spend even more money on uh CapEx and data centers, um, you know, the market has decided to uh punish them for that. Okay. But what what does spending more money on AI and data centers mean to Micron? It means that more memory chips are going to be purchased, right? More NVIDIA chips are gonna be purchased. And ironically, both you know, Nvidia and Micron have gotten hit because of that too. Makes no sense to me. But this is the sort of like the way the market has decided to um uh to react. And then uh last night we got word that SK Heinrich reported and they missed estimates. Now, what does missed estimates mean? It means that their revenues were only up 275%, their profits were up over 500%. Uh, and uh they only made $41 billion of profits in the last quarter, which if you extrapolate for uh you know annualize that, that's like roughly a $200 billion profit annualized, assuming they don't grow from here, uh from here on. So $200 billion of profits is more profits than any company in history has made, historically. Certainly any American company. Um, and uh and then the market has decided that you know what, uh SK Heinex is worth less than a trillion, despite being able to pump out 200 billion in in profits per year. Uh, and of course, we got um Micron get hit because of that news as well today. So the combination of things, so there's there's sort of like the story and narrative that uh moves stock prices, because what is the stock price? The stock price is just a reflection of uh buyers and sellers. If there's more buyers, the stock price goes up. If there's more sellers, the stock stock price goes down. So it's as simple as that, right? Like fundamentally, that's what a marketplace is is if there's more buyers, stock goes up. If there's more sellers or whatever it is, not just stock, right? It goes down. So uh what uh what creates more buyers or sellers? Uh the story and narrative is what creates it. So Michael Berry comes and says, Oh, you know, like um I'm shorting Micron and Nvidia and the whole AI trade. It's all bullshit. Uh at the same time, we get like uh uh Jim Kramer going sour on data centers. And like these are just narratives, stories, right? These are this is not reality or actual things that are happening. What is happening is that these companies are still still crushing it. Uh they're still spending a lot on CapEx. So the reality and the stories don't match up. And whenever the reality is way better than at least so far it has been, way better than the stories that people are telling, which is that uh uh everything, the sky is falling and everything is falling apart. Uh when those things are a mismatch, it creates opportunities, which is the way I'm I'm viewing the market. And that's why I've bought back some of those micron shares that I sold. So, you know, where where can you buy a company for five times profits, the next year's profits? Uh like when have I ever been able to do that? That's just such a rare circumstance. So if micron profits, by the way, just for sake of argument, expected profits for the next year were to have, like down 50% from uh from what uh they're they're expected to earn. So instead of earning, you know, um something like $120 billion over the course of the next year, they only earn the uh they make only $60 billion worth of profits. Uh well, what's a $60 billion profit company worth? Right? Uh if it's worth you know uh 15 times that, 20 times that, it's still a trillion dollar company. So so you know, it it just makes no sense for it to be trading where it's trading. Uh and that's assuming a 50% discount on the expected profits. Uh so if if the expected profits happen to materialize or even be beaten, then the opportunity is even greater, right? So um seems like a no-brainer.

SPEAKER_02 11:24

Yeah, I I agree with all that. Um personally, as you know, I bought my first round of micron shares at around $350 a share, and then I bought more after Micron corrected uh to I think it was like $913 a share, which looking back, I should have waited a little bit longer, but you just can't touch these things. There's no way to know, yeah. Right. Um, I would love to be buying more here. I'm currently like maxed out on my target allocation. So if Micron continues to fall, there's a good chance I do buy more. Um but we'll see.

SPEAKER_01 12:02

One thing that the market has taught me multiple times is that no matter what the price is, it can always go down further. Yeah, right. Like that that is one thing that is universal. And that's why like when people say, Oh, has it bottomed out, or like, is it time to buy? My answer is always, I don't know. Like, there's no way for me to know. I don't nobody has a crystal ball. And anybody who confidently tells you one way or the other that from this point forward it's only going up or it's never seeing X dollars again or whatever, anybody who speaks confidently in that way, uh, like Jim Kramer yesterday was like, you know, at open, you should sell. If you own any data center stocks, especially on margin. Now, if he had just said if you own anything on margin, it's not a good idea, right? Like you shouldn't be buying on leverage. Um, and you should just, you know, like think about getting off margin. In general, that I think I would think that would be good advice. But he's like, no, definitely sell at close. You will not regret. I'm like, okay, clown. Anytime somebody says something with so much confidence, they're they're a clown, right? There's no way to know with that level of certainty uh any of this stuff. So um it's always speculation, first of all. Uh and uh and and then within the speculation, we're just trying to decide which opportunity is better than another opportunity, right? And and fundamentally, that's what we're doing as investors. But that's what listeners want.

SPEAKER_02 13:24

They want someone who just knows the future. You know, do you know how many subscribers we would have if we just told everyone exactly what was going to happen?

SPEAKER_01 13:33

What to do with absolute certainty. You know what's funny is that uh Jim Kramer in particular, just to pick on him for for a little bit, uh, because he he's been sort of like um he's done some very shady things for a very long time, but he also sells this sort of CNBC investment club. He's sort of like a key person behind that. And I was trying to determine what is the performance, historical performance of the CNBC Investment Club. You cannot know. It is like totally opaque. Nobody knows that. Nobody knows Jim Kramer's performance, like except for Jim Kramer, obviously. So there is no way to even determine whether or not some of these guys are uh legit or not. Uh and then when you look at sort of sort of like Michael Burry, who, you know, obviously the big short movie was made about, because of a great call that he made in 2008, um, you know, shorting the market back then, and uh uh and because of that fame, uh you know, he's super popular and people listen to them. So when he says, I'm shorting Micron or Nvidia or the whole AI trade, or these guys are all fudging their books and numbers, people listen. But what's his track record? Oh, it turns out for the past you know three years, he's actually been negative. And for the past five years, cumulatively, he's made 15%. Uh his portfolio has made 15%, where the SP 500 has made 68%. So he is literally like the SP had uh, you know, just this random index fund that anybody could just put put money into with no time or effort or thought has outperformed Michael Burry's performance for the past five years on average by 350%. Meaning you would have 350 more returns within the SP 500 than you would with Michael Burry. So, you know, why are we listening to this guy? Like, what's the reason that we're even taking this guy seriously? It just it's baffling to me that uh that we put so much emphasis on some of these things.

SPEAKER_02 15:33

I think part of it is you have investors that don't understand the fundamentals of the company. So when they see this headline, they're like, oh, Michael Burry must know more than I do. Right. There's a bit of um like I guess the opposite of FOMO or FUD, uh fear, uncertainty, doubt that takes hold.

SPEAKER_01 15:54

You know, we do make these heroes in in our our society, and then like whatever the hero does, that the hero is correct, right? Like, so you know, in in a way, he's looked up uh as the hero who went against the grain in 2008 and was right, but but there's a lot of people who were like calling that right. Most of them I didn't get a movie made about me from 2008, but I also wanted to call it, you know.

SPEAKER_02 16:19

Yeah, the movie is in the works. It's coming. And by the way, that's roughly 20 years ago already. It wasn't like this was a great call yesterday, this was a great call two decades ago. Right. Um, I do want to go back to Micron's price falling and predictions, not that I have one, but I do want to talk about precedent. And I know I've mentioned this several times on the podcast of how I like to compare uh NVIDIA's run-up and corrections to Micron. The largest NVIDIA correction was 43%. Um, if Micron were to crash 43%, that would bring it to $715 a share, which we're actually pretty close to right now. Um, that's not to say that Micron can't go below that. It most certainly can, but I just want to call out there's very much a precedent for the price to go down this much. And you don't necessarily need to worry. There's nothing uh broken in the core thesis uh of the company.

SPEAKER_01 17:22

Right. So the company itself has not said any that they have any concerns. The everything that the company has said is that they're sold out for the next year and supply will be tight, likely into 2028 and potentially beyond. Uh, and uh they have just increased their expectations of revenues and profits for the next quarter uh and for the foreseeable future. And by the way, they've said that they have now long-term contracts with their customers to the tune of roughly $100 billion of pre-sold memory chips at set uh uh prices or at uh at um with floor pricing, meaning like it cannot be sold for below a certain price or above a certain price to sort of protect the customer and to protect Micron. So, you know, the combination of the reality of what has actually happened uh versus the the narrative and the stories, there's a major disconnect. And uh and I think that's the that's the thing that I keep top of mind as I'm trying to make decisions and the FUD goes crazy and everybody's looking at, oh, has is the sky falling? Is it about to be over? And it's like, all right, I've seen this story before. Right, and that's exactly why you're buying.

SPEAKER_02 18:35

That's right. Um okay, let's move. We have earnings from Meta, Robinhood, and Microsoft. Um I will let you pick. Oh, you restarted your uh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:50

Okay, let me let me go ahead and share my screen real quick. Uh let's see here. I think it's this one, and okay, so we have Microsoft. Let's see if I can zoom in here. So we have Microsoft who has already reported, and it looks like every stock is sort of like going up and down. Let's see what their actual report was. Um 90 billion revenue uh expectation was 87, so that's a 2.7% beat, and EPS of $4.74. Expectation was $4.23. That's a 12% beat on EPS. Um, and then the stock price uh in after hours is up roughly 1.4%. So uh not bad. Uh what was Meta's? Let's take a look over here. Meta is down after hours. That's not a good sign. Especially since it doesn't necessarily okay. Let's see. So revenue is basically flat. Yeah, so revenues up uh or beat 1%. There the revenues are not flat. The 60.8 billion uh revenue expectation or 60.2 billion was expected, 60.8 billion is what they reported. Uh, it is up pretty significantly compared to a year ago. So yeah, when I said flat, I meant relative to the expectation. But yeah, that's a good correction. So last year for Q2, they had 47 billion in revenue. So that 60 uh.8 billion divided by it's 47.5 is roughly a 28% increase year over year. So uh pretty pretty awesome uh continued growth uh for for Meta. Less but they just they did miss CPS, which yeah. What was their missing? 14% miss. 14%, yeah. So that's that's an interesting miss. It'll be oh, I wonder if that's because of the workforce reduction. So that there might be a one-time activity there as well. So um, and then the other company that reported is Robin Hood. And let's see, what do they do here? So Robin Hood, 1.3 billion expectations was 1.2, that's an 8% beat. Profits of 62 cents, EPS um uh uh the earnings per share estimates were 41 cents. So that's a 51% beat. That's huge. Do you think that's a one-time event, or do you think that's real? Yeah, that's a great question. Um I don't know. Uh but they're only at the 30% aftermarket. I was gonna say, based on the reaction, it might be a one time event. So again, we'll have to look at those details later because um we'll probably have to let dive into the sort of uh reports and

SPEAKER_02 22:00

Such um do any of them have their do you want to go over any like slides or report decks? I don't know if we have access to that yet.

SPEAKER_01 22:07

Um I think there was some of them, so let's see. Um Robin Hood. Oh yeah, slides there. Where's their slides? Let's uh the the problem is trying to digest this stuff live. Um I know so funded customers up pretty substantially from Q1, about a million. That's pretty good, like up uh 940,000 customers sequentially uh Robinhood Cold subscribers up pretty substantially, 17%. Um assets on the platform up again, like uh 20% sequentially, 32% year over year. Net deposits pretty good. Let's see, does anything kind of like stand out here? It does look like their net profits is normal. It does is you know 573 million net income. There's not a uh obvious indication, at least in the slide deck, that um it was from one-time expenses or one-time benefits, rather. But um, all right, let's let's move to other topics and then we can uh maybe digest this stuff later and then talk about it next week a little bit.

SPEAKER_02 23:29

Okay, so staying on um the earnings track, Ravian is reporting their earnings tomorrow. So I figured it might be good to just talk about expectations. A lot of the details already came out because they released preliminary results, which we covered a couple weeks ago. Um where uh they were expecting revenue to come in between 1.55 billion to 1.65 billion. Uh and delivery expectations were over 12,000 vehicles delivered versus the 9,000 to 11,000 vehicle guidance. So what what what are your expectations? What do you think uh is the general market expectations for Rivian tomorrow?

SPEAKER_01 24:17

I think I think the devil for Rivian is gonna be in the details of what they talk about with respect to uh first of all, it's gonna be about operating margins, so or automotive margins in particular, if you exclude software. So is that improving? So that's gonna be a big question on investors' mind. Um, what's their uh guidance and confidence for Q3 and Q4 of this year, and how will margins improve? Because the the expectations that they have set out on uh deliveries is that deliveries are gonna double uh in the second half of uh of 2026 versus the first half of 2026. So uh it how confident are they that that is going to happen? I think that's gonna be sort of like a key issue. And then assuming that that does happen, what does that do to margins and profitability and cash flow? So uh if the the answers to those things are positive, I I like I feel like that that's not baked into the stock price. But um but considering everything has been hit, you never know. Maybe, maybe those things are baked into the stock price and we just don't know. But to me, again, this feels like a lot of positive momentum for Rivian, especially if they can get margins under control uh and uh have positive margins coming out of this year, uh that would be huge. And from from again, from my perspective, a $25 billion market cap or under a $25 billion or even under a $50 billion market cap in my view is very, very inexpensive for a company that has this much technology and just momentum and good things going for it. So um yeah, but we'll I I think we'll the the stock will probably move, yeah, at least in one direction or the other. Uh I'll I'll take that. And pretty significantly is what I mean. Like it's not gonna be, I don't think it's gonna be a five percent move in one direction. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 26:12

Yeah. Uh yeah, I think obviously the story here is very much on R2. Um, and in regards to this earnings, we'll we'll get some details, but it it is gonna be a little early, I think, to know exactly how things are going. And I think the next earnings is gonna be the big one here where there should be a more significant uh jump in in revenue.

SPEAKER_01 26:39

That's true. But it's gonna be like a lot of it is going to be dependent on what's the expectation that they set about the next earnings. Right. Right.

SPEAKER_02 26:48

Or do they set an expectation at all? Yeah, because they they can avoid it, which probably would be a bad sign. Um but who knows. So yeah, I'm I'm looking forward to it. Um I think we're we're really at like the beginning of this new uh wave for Rivian.

SPEAKER_01 27:10

Especially with the R2 uh being such a uh well-received product. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 27:17

Um okay. So I think a week ago, maybe a little bit longer, we released some new features uh for Savvy Trader that actually is a cool way to show off your portfolio um and how it's evolved over the years. Uh so I thought it'd be good to go through. So the two things I want to show off is the new allocation history chart and then the allocation snapshots.

SPEAKER_01 27:44

Um what are the allocation? Well, you might have to tell me because you're not sharing your screen. You might have to tell me what you what you want demoed here. So that's fine. You're you're on the you're on the first one, you're good. Okay. The allocation history. So this this is a like actually, this is a very cool feature that we added that uh gives you a historical view of what a particular portfolio such as mine has held. So you can uh hover over a particular stock uh like Bumble and see, you know, or like Micron in this case, see how that uh, you know, like for example, Micron, I started it uh in uh late December, uh, and then how quickly it has grown to such a uh massive portion of my portfolio. Um here's sort of meta where uh, and this is for the past year, we can actually go back uh to all time, uh, which in my case is since April 2026. You can see sort of I was making uh big bets in Meta in 2022 and 2023. And then as the stock price started to skyrocket, because back then it was around $100 to $200 a share when I was building my position. Uh, but then as uh it went beyond four or five, six hundred dollars a share, I started trimming my position until more recently, where um I've been a buyer of Meta again.

SPEAKER_02 29:05

So can you can you hover over uh Rocket Lab on the left? Uh yeah. So there's Rocket Lab that's a crazy one where you could kind of see the full story of it relative to your portfolio, where it kind of started out as a small position and has obviously really grown one from you adding and two from just uh the price growth.

SPEAKER_01 29:26

Yeah. Yeah. And then I trimmed pretty heavily uh uh in this area in the and since their last quarterly report, which turned out to be a well-timed trim. But uh again, these things are like har hardly predictable. But the reason I had trimmed Rocket Lab pretty heavily is because um the the price had gotten so far ahead of its current performance, and you know, at $150 a share, uh you know, just the again, this is something that I've talked about before, but I I I think it's great to own great companies, but valuation matters. And um and sometimes great companies can get people investors can get overly excited about a great company, and the valuation can get significantly ahead of its current performance. Now, um, one might argue that uh uh Rocket Lab being down 60% from its highs is back to being in a reasonable uh price range again, um, especially with the iridium um uh iridium uh purchase that they're making. But the market as a whole is significantly weaker than it was a month ago. So uh taking that into consideration, it's it's hard to say whether or not this sort of $60 price range is uh is the right price range to add again. Now it's still a significant portion of my portfolio, so I have chosen not to add just yet. Um I've chosen to add uh Meta and Micron, largely because companies that are profitable in uh in a market that is very terminal are generally able to sort of um bring themselves out of ruts, if you will, much better because they can use their profits to purchase stock and and so on, do do things that um companies that are not yet profitable, such as Rocket Lab, can't do yet. So um that's the reason why I haven't been adding Rocket Lab, and I have been adding Micron and Meta. Okay, so the or do you was there something else you wanted to show for this chart? No, I was gonna say let's go back to to this thing. What what what else did you want to see? Okay, so also like just look at a particular holding like this. It's kind of cool. Yeah, it's a great feature. Yeah, I know I love this though. The implementation came out fantastic. I love it.

SPEAKER_02 31:49

Great job on that. It's just one of those things, again, that drives me nuts about current brokerages, like even Robinhood and Robin Hood's the best of the best, but they don't show you these visualizations that they should be able to provide that just add a level of transparency to your portfolio to understand what's going on. Right. Um and it helps you better manage. Yeah, like the history of cash is really cool to see.

SPEAKER_01 32:15

Yeah, and you can see like my cash throughout the entire uh time I've uh had my portfolio public has been generally over 20%, with the exception of uh earlier this year, when I had to take out some cash um for tax purposes, and then I started buying Micron heavily. And then as I unloaded some Rocket Lab, I didn't reuse that cash and I let it go back to over 20%, which is roughly where I am right now as well.

SPEAKER_02 32:43

Right. Um, okay, so the other feature I wanted to talk about. So we've had a feature for a while now where you could see all of your previous holdings, but we haven't had a way to show uh what your actual portfolio was historically, like what were all the holdings you held in you know, December of 2023 or whatever. So now you there's if you scroll up, Amid, because that's this is the original feature we released where it just shows everything you held previously. Okay. There's a little clock, or you can go to the analytics tab or stay on this tab, but it uh in the positions widget, there's a little clock button next to copy portfolio. Yeah. Gotcha. And then from here, you could select any month or year to see what your portfolio actually looked like. So I'm curious to see what your portfolio looked like when you started Savvy Trader and maybe how different it is today.

SPEAKER_01 33:40

Yeah. So uh when I started Savvy Trader, that was April of uh 2022. Um I owned uh Twitter, uh Robinhood ATT, which uh I held as a cash alternative uh for its dividends. Back then, remember interest rates were 0% or close to 0%. You might be able to get 0.25 or something in a money market fund, uh, where ATT was giving like 6% dividends. So I was holding ATT as um cash alternative. Uh significant portion of my uh portfolio was in Tesla. Uh FUV was that uh Arkimoto, that uh yeah EV company that uh basically went bankrupt. Um that was uh that was a bad bet. But um FFBC was also a cash alternative. This was sort of like another company that similar to ATT was giving roughly 5% dividend, and I was starting to build my meta position. So if we uh if we go back to like still 2022, but go to like December, you can see my meta position became my largest position within that time frame. Uh and then I had started to get rid of ATT and cash alternatives basically. Um, I was betting on Meta and Robinhood and Netflix back then uh and and a little bit of Uber. So these were my main four holdings, and I had already started trimming Tesla pretty heavily.

SPEAKER_02 35:06

So for all the people that think you hate Tesla, yeah, you were a shareholder for a while.

SPEAKER_01 35:13

Well, what's what's cool about that? Well, I was a shareholder for for a long time of Tesla, but what's cool about like the historical information and in uh savvy trader is just the trend level of transparency that you can get. Every single transaction history is there, by the way, and you can examine it. But by having these other ways of seeing what was being held and what was the performance of the portfolio in a given time time frame, uh it's helpful because it you know it helps build trust. And the reason I wanted to build uh Savvy Trader in the first place is to bring that transparency to investors who seem to be the Michael Jordan of investing all the time on X and Twitter at the time, right? But but uh they rarely share their actual portfolios and they never do it in real time. Like people like Michael Berry, for example. So you don't even know has is he still short micron or has he covered his position? He'll announce it at some point in the future, but uh those things are not in uh real time. So, you know, these are these are part of the reasons that I am an advocate for transparency, and you know, like I've been sharing my portfolio as a result of that.

SPEAKER_02 36:24

Absolutely. You need to know if you're going to, you know, listen to any, or not listen, but follow anyone uh that is talking about the markets and maybe having some influence on how you interact with the markets, you gotta make sure you could trust whoever whoever, you know.

SPEAKER_01 36:43

Yeah. I I think it's fair to at least be able to say, like, what is your performance?

SPEAKER_02 36:49

Right. Yeah, it's it's not and it to be clear, it's not that anyone is doing anything nefarious necessarily. It's just like, you know, it someone could be talking as if they know everything and their portfolio is subpar, like mine, by the way. Um or you could you could follow someone like Hamid, who has genuinely been killing it, you know, for the last four years since Zappy Trader um has been released. Um okay, let's move on to listener questions. Adrian, what do we have?

SPEAKER_00 37:23

Can you hear me?

SPEAKER_02 37:25

We can.

SPEAKER_00 37:27

Hey.

SPEAKER_01 37:28

Hello. I'm extra loud today.

SPEAKER_00 37:31

I'm extra loud.

SPEAKER_01 37:33

I'll I'll adjust it, don't worry.

SPEAKER_00 37:35

Okay. Um, so are you oh sorry. I okay. In this situation, are you looking at switching out any of your holdings that aren't getting pulled back to allocate more toward these new opportunities?

SPEAKER_01 37:52

So I I have um been selling a little bit of uh Robinhood to purchase Meta, for example. In the past few weeks, I've done a few trades like that where I sold some uh Robinhood to sort of like maintain my cash or even increase my cash slightly. Um, but you know, because I generally hold a relatively large cash position, I often don't have to sell something in order to buy something else. I can just buy it and then later decide do I want to increase my cash position or not. What about you, Dustin? What do you do you do like sell something specifically to buy something else?

SPEAKER_02 38:29

Or no, no, I don't have any like grand plans. I have been casually selling and casually buying. Like, as you know, I've been selling Robin Hood as well. I think last time I sold Robinhood, it was at $117 a share, and now it's down to like $90 a share. So that was a good move for now. Um, I I am bullish on Robinhood, by the way. Like, I it's just that I believe that they were overvalued in that moment. Um I companies that I'm or stocks that I'm looking to buy more of, like Micron, if it continues to go down, I'm definitely interested in, um, which you know means that it's going up from here. It's not going to give me that opportunity because that's just how the market works. Um I like Iron, which I've been buying. Uh and that's that was down a lot today. That was down like 13%. But I did, you know, just because things are down doesn't mean I always buy. And sometimes that hurts me, sometimes that helps me, but I do like to buy when things are really, really, really bad. So that's my favorite time to buy. Um and I actually don't think we're there yet. Um, and it doesn't mean we're gonna get there. But I'm all I I'm also like I'm happy with how my portfolio is set up right now. Like I'm I'm pretty fully allocated in regards to like what I'm looking to do.

SPEAKER_00 39:47

So ready to move on?

SPEAKER_02 39:50

Let's do it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 39:53

Hi Dustin and Hamid, how do you all feel about daily leverage tickers in the memory sector such as RAM and MUU?

SPEAKER_01 40:02

I'll let you respond to this first, Dustin, and and then I have my opinions. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 40:07

So my bias is against leverage. Um, I think as an investor, one of the uh emotions you need to manage the most is greed. So an easy rule of thumb is to just stay away from leverage. With that said, if you are looking for leverage, I do think one of the better ways to um one of the better instruments to use is one of these ETFs. I personally don't touch them, what I said, you know, on based on prior. And th and for example, by the way, when Micron hit $1,000 a share, and a lot of us were thinking, oh, you know, it's going to $1,800 a share or $2,000 a share. You just don't know. So if you're levered up and now all of a sudden it drops down to $750, it's harder to stomach that when you're in one of these ETFs. Um, you know, it doesn't matter how confident you are. You I I I just rather personally invest my own dollars into directly into these companies as opposed to these um third-party levered mechanisms.

SPEAKER_01 41:21

100%. I I I agree fullheartedly. I think it's uh bad idea to be on margin because you never know what when things can get bad, and then when they get bad, they can always get worse. So um, and the only way to be able to ride it out without sort of uh this you know mental meltdown, if you will, is is to not be in a position where uh you're getting margin calls or pushed to sell something. Um lever ETFs are slightly better than uh doing margin on your own, but not much better because they're still going to go down rapidly uh as the stock prices go uh go down as well. So yeah, managing.

SPEAKER_02 42:04

And by the way, even if the company or the stock is set up for success, there's always macro factors or just random, like just totally irrelevant factors that could fluctuate the market. Um, like in this case, oil prices are are increased, and that's driving the market down a bit. Um, and that's maybe something that that you took into account, or maybe something you didn't take into account. But it's very difficult to know no matter how confident you are in an individual stock, you have to be confident in the broader market too. That's what I'm so yeah.

SPEAKER_00 42:40

Talk another a little bit more about micron. Would you buy micron options at these prices?

SPEAKER_02 42:48

Similar question.

SPEAKER_01 42:50

Yeah, well, I mean it's not leverage though. So if you if you're using cash to buy options, that's a different story. The way I would view, or the way I do view, not I would view, the way I would uh I view options is that um it's sort of a gambling uh that's why I'm saying it's similar. Well, it it's uh the leverage is different because you're borrowing to to buy something, right? Um and uh that's way worse in my opinion than than just gambling money that you have.

SPEAKER_03 43:24

Right.

SPEAKER_01 43:25

I don't know that you with both you could easily end up where you where you you're at zero. Uh with leverage, you can go below zero too, which uh which is kind of crazy. Um with the ETFs, though. No, not with the ETFs. That's right. That's right. Uh you're correct. Um, but but um uh but with options, uh that that's the way I view it. So uh then the the the you know like I'm not dead set against gambling, but I look at it more as a form of entertainment uh and not from a form of investment. Uh and then it's like ah every now and then I'm like, okay, this would be fun. To gamble on just to see whether or not like I'm right about this or uh or wrong. Um and and I do do it, uh I do buy options occasionally, but it's significantly less than 1% of my portfolio. So just so just so you understand, like that's the level of which I'm comfortable gambling. Um, and that's the way I would view it. I wouldn't view it as investment. Um now, if you happen to be right, you know, it could easily have huge returns. Uh options are ways to make 10 times your investment money on on options if you happen to be right, but it's also uh the vast majority of the time you're you're not right and it goes to zero. So just so you you understand the the price is baked in so that like you're not right majority of the time. So um keep that in mind.

SPEAKER_02 44:50

Yeah, that what the problem with options for me is not only you do you need to be right about the direction in which the stock is going to move, but you need to be correct on the timing. And this might sound easy, you just need to be right about two things, direction and time. It makes it so much harder, at least twice as hard, right? It's a second, it's a second vector. Um that's right. It's really, really hard to do both of these things correctly. And the market moves in ways obviously that no one understands, right? Like again, going back to Micron, of it was at $1,000 a share. You kind of think, okay, it's it has a lot of momentum, it's going to keep going. Maybe you buy some options and all of a sudden it tanks to $750. Your options aren't doing too hot. As opposed to owning shares. And they might expire soon. Right. It becomes worthless. Right. As opposed to owning shares, let's say you uh at a thousand dollars at a thousand dollars you buy 10 shares and then it drops to $750. Well, you still own your 10 shares of Micron. That's not going away. So as long as you still have that belief and you're a long-term investor and you could ride it out, maybe it is going to $1,800. And it's, you know, you're still going to get there. You're just on that journey, and owning the shares directly allow you to be a part of that ride as opposed to trying to take these shortcuts. Um, so that's that's my idea.

SPEAKER_01 46:20

Yeah, I I agree.

SPEAKER_00 46:22

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 46:23

Adrian, what else do we have?

SPEAKER_00 46:25

We need some psychological uplifting. How do you guys deal with days like this, like psychologically?

SPEAKER_01 46:33

Zooming out is helpful uh if you've been investing for a long time. Um so uh uh I'll uh go to my portfolio here. And if we look at today, today is down 4.2%, Micron down almost 10%, Rocket Lab down 8%. Uh it's a very bad day, right? Like uh overall, my portfolio was down 4.2 percent. Um, but you know, when I look at year to date, I'm looking at uh, oh wow, I'm still up 22%. That's a fantastic year. If if the year was over today and I was only up 22%, that would be a uh fantastic year in uh under normal circumstances. So um, and then if we go out further, if I go out one full year, uh I'm up uh 45%. So it's easier the further out that I go, right? And since April of 2022, uh my portfolio has been up almost 700%. So uh that definitely is helpful to zoom out. If you're a new investor, zooming out might not be an option. So um the the way I would encourage people to think about investments is from, you know, like when you buy a house to live in it, uh if somebody, if you bought a house, half a million dollar house, and uh the next day somebody came and put uh this is sort of a uh um uh Warren Buffett story, where but if somebody like stood outside of your house with a bullhorn and uh announced the price of what the value of your house is every single day, it might be a little nerve-wracking, right? Like next day it's like 490, 490, 490. Next day it's 480, 470, 470, and then you might get nervous. Oh my god, I I have a $450,000 loan on this home. What if it goes below that? Maybe I should sell the house people and and the whole time you're like using the house. If you didn't know what the price of the house was, which is how most people operate, uh, you're just living in it and you don't care because you own the house and you're you're functioning just fine. When you're investing in a company, think of it as you're buying a piece of ownership in that company, and then you're just like, you're fine. You you own a piece of micron or you own a piece of meta or you own a piece of space at whatever company you happen to believe in, uh, and just like just mentally think of it from that perspective rather than should I be selling, should I be buying, should I be selling and and just you know, think of it from a long-term perspective. And um, and that becomes way more helpful is uh when you buy with a long-term mindset, um, the the bumps and uh valleys and the um in the price of the stock become easier to to digest.

SPEAKER_02 49:20

So, what I was gonna say before you said it, there there's a comment saying, when in doubt, zoom out, which is exactly what you talked about. I will say, if you're zooming out on your portfolio, you don't have much history, what you could do is zoom out on the stock charts of the of your investments, right? Um like micron, you zoom out, it's still up a ton over the year. Even if you weren't a part of that ride for the entire year, you can kind of get a sense of you know, maybe this drop wasn't as big as it feels right now, um, just because of the uh huge rise that it's had. Um but also like again, as if you're a long-term investor and you don't need the money tomorrow, why does it matter if the stock is down? If anything, that should feel like an opportunity if you have cash on the side for you to buy. And by the way, if you don't have cash on the side, and this is not investment advice, of course, but if you don't have cash on the side and you feel uh a lot of anxiety on days like today, maybe that should be a thought of okay, I need to start building some sort of cash cushion. So I just so mentally, you know, you you can get this right. Because that that also helps. Right.

SPEAKER_00 50:38

Okay, you ready?

SPEAKER_01 50:40

Let's do it.

SPEAKER_00 50:41

Yeah. This is for Hamid, but I'm sure Dustin has thoughts. How did you come to develop your strategy of keeping a large cash cash position as a way to deal with volatility?

SPEAKER_01 50:54

I I'm I'm not sure how I came about that, but like it's it's often you know, when when you're in the uh stock market for long enough, you see major corrections and crashes from time to time. Uh and you know, just in the past couple of years, we've had several of them, right? Whether it's been tariffs or a war starting, or you know, uh oil prices skyrocketing, or whatever it is. Like there, there's all kinds of things that cause pretty significant significant size uh corrections in the market. Uh and oftentimes they rebound uh also just as quickly. Um, so you know, when when those things happen and you don't have cash to be able to take advantage of the opportunities, then it's like, oh, I wish I had cash. And I suspect something like that has happened early in the 2000s for me, and I just decided that I'm going to have a fairly large cash position in general. Uh, and I've operated that way for the vast majority of uh my my investing investment career, especially post the sale of my company, where the back the you know most of my net worth became just my portfolio. So uh cash is also a good way for me to like not have to worry about, oh, am I gonna have to sell stock in order to pay for my next year's worth of expenses, right? That that's not ever a position that I want to be in.

SPEAKER_02 52:16

So I don't really have I don't really have too many thoughts on this. At the moment, I happen to have a large cash position, but that's not necessarily a larger strategy. A lot of that cash is actually reserved to buy into Bitcoin just because of the way my portfolio works, where half the portfolio is roughly Bitcoin crypto related, half is stock related. Um so I actually don't have as much cash as it looks in my stock portfolio right now.

SPEAKER_01 52:48

Cool. Let's go to another one. Adrian.

SPEAKER_00 52:51

Okay, someone wants you to talk about um Lucid. Let me pull this up. There's our channel is very busy. Um, any chance we could chat about Lucid and the new 5% stake by Saudi, who they call the Middle East Warren Buffett guy.

SPEAKER_01 53:11

I haven't been uh following Lucid since uh uh the Saudi fund purchased a significant portion of Lucid. Um, but but um they've also been unimpressive from an execution standpoint to me. Uh they've had lots of issues with their vehicles, um, lots of issues with software. They don't have uh uh the level of um uh customer sat that Tesla and Rivian enjoy. They don't have the level of um like would you purchase this car again type of uh response from their customers. Uh and then they haven't been able to increase volumes of deliveries and so on over the past year, several years. Uh and they're far more cash stripped, cash uh um uh short of cash, if you will, than than uh Ribbian is. So uh when you look at the the overall sort of EV market uh for US-based companies, um, and you think of you know the Coke and Pepsi, the ATT and Verizon, the the two, you know, uh iPhone and Android, the two sort of like market leaders that generally emerge in any sort of like major market, um, those two leaders are probably gonna be Tesla and somebody else. And it's just hard for me to imagine that that somebody else would be uh Lucid as opposed to Rivian. So Rivian is in a much better position despite having struggled as much as they have, despite having burnt through as much cash as they have, and they're still not out of it, by the way. Uh, and Lucid is much, much, much further behind Rivian uh in in that same sense, and has a lot less cash, and doesn't have the R2 equivalent already out there with massive uh orders and uh being able to sort of uh see the light at the end of the tunnel. So um Lucid does not represent an excited opportunity from my standpoint, and I've like had that same opinion for several years now, and that hasn't changed.

SPEAKER_02 55:10

Where I start with EVs is what do I personally see on the roads, which maybe isn't the best thing to do, but that's just how I handle it. And I just really don't see Lucid at all. Like I see a little bit of uh Polaris. Uh is that the that's the name of the Bobo, yeah. Um but that too is probably going away. Yeah. And then, but I see a ton of Rivian and obviously uh amazing amount of Tesla. Um so it's uh there that I I I haven't really looked too much into Lucid just because it doesn't meet that minimal uh criteria. And then going to the piece of the what they call the Middle East Warren Buffett guy, which I think is funny. To that I will say there is only one Warren Buffett, just like how there is only one Steve Jobs, everyone's like, oh, this is the next Steve Jobs, and it's like there's never going to be the next Steve Jobs. Like, you know, you could say Elon Musk is kind of like a Steve Jobs, but he's not Steve Jobs, he's Elon Musk, right? Like you make a name for yourself. Um, so there will only ever be one.

SPEAKER_00 56:20

Okay, uh here's another one. Here's about Meta. Can you explain why workforce reduction would lead to EPS miss for Meta?

SPEAKER_01 56:29

Um a lot of times they take one-time charges uh as uh part of exit packages for uh workforce reduction. So uh if, for example, you're on average giving out a year's worth of salary in a in a uh as you let go of 10% of your staff, for that 10% you have roughly four times the expense that then you would. And you there the expenses might be higher than a year's worth of salary, by the way. Um, but if it was just a year, it would be roughly four times higher expense than what you would normally incur for that 10% in that one quarter. So that would be an example as to why. Now, there might be other reasons why Meta missed, by the way. Um, so you know, we'll have to dive into that, but um but that that could be one potential reason.

SPEAKER_02 57:18

Yeah, so basically there's that uh the increased expense of uh paying off the severance packages, but then over time you make your money back um from the savings.

SPEAKER_01 57:31

Starting the following quarter, usually. Yeah. But but um just uh skimming through their um slide deck, it did look like their sales and marketing expenses were significantly higher than previous quarters. So that that might have something to do with it as well. And that might be why the market is reacting so negatively to it. I think the stock is down pretty heavily after hours.

SPEAKER_00 57:53

Okay, here's the SaaS question. What do you think about SaaS companies like Adobe, ServiceNow, and Salesforce?

SPEAKER_01 58:02

I don't know about uh ServiceNow and Salesforce, but I was just looking at Adobe the other day, and uh it's like uh its price is the most attractive it has ever been. It's selling at a price earnings ratio of roughly 10, which is pretty incredible. So uh yeah, it's it's uh the price is pretty fantastic. I guess the question becomes in a world where people ask AI to do their edits, do creative people still need Adobe's products as much? And or do people need creative people? Or yeah. I think I think creative people are still needed, but maybe there there'll be more of them that are more entrepreneurial, you know, creating their work for themselves as opposed to for others. Because technically, you should, you know, like you can see people asking AI to do more and more of what they would normally ask a creative person to do. So yeah, it's it's hard to know what the answer to that latter question is. So far, Adobe's numbers have not been like crashing down or anything like that. So uh if I was an Adobe shareholder, I probably wouldn't sell any at this point. But because of AI, it's kind of scary to get into some of these, some of these names. And um I personally haven't ventured into them. I've been more focused on AI being uh pretty incredible.

SPEAKER_02 59:35

So yeah, I recently, my recently over the last few months, developed a hard line of not investing in any software companies that don't have a tangible moat outside of the software itself, meaning cut you know five, ten years into the future, where who knows where AI will be at that point, but it's gonna be better than it is today. If I'm able to say I want you to recreate Adobe Premiere Pro functionality, and it could just do it within you know an hour or less.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:21

Um but but even scarier might be that like you could give um uh you know Claude or you know, open uh Chat GPT or whatever your video files and say, hey, can you edit these for me and um you know tell it exactly what you want done as opposed to you know like and then it could show it to you on a timeline, right? Like that is where AI is going to be going if they had enough compute to do it, right? They we already know this type of stuff is possible. It's just that compute is the constraint. And this is why I'm so optimistic on uh investments in compute continuing for several more years, is because there's so much more we can do with AI that we haven't even begun to do, largely because we don't have enough compute. Now, we know AI is capable of doing that today, um, but uh but you you know these products haven't started offering these features because they literally can't. Like when they offer a new feature where it takes up a lot of uh uh compute resources on their back end, they literally have to like throttle uh the rollout of those features just because they can't handle uh how quickly people use up their compute resources. So uh that has been a problem. Uh yeah, so I'm I'm with you on that. Is that it's kind of a scary thing to invest in from that standpoint.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:46

To you to your point, these comp these software companies, they could be uh disrupted at the software level, which is more what I was describing, or at the deliverable level, which is easy to see with Adobe. Whereas like um a Salesforce, the deliverable is you need the AI to be doing the sales for you, right? Right, which it definitely can do in the future, in theory. Um, but there is a world where you might want to have software that you're still going to use on a day-to-day basis. Um, you know, especially in the Salesforce case, if you do have sales reps. Um, or even if you have AI sales reps, you might want software to manage that.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:29

You know what's an interesting analogy is like if you were to think about the transportation industry, like we we move humans with cars, we move you know, merchandise with uh trucks or whatever. Uh and uh and then we happen to have invented uh you know trans uh teleporters, right? Um and the teleporters, you just put something in the teleporter and like make it appear wherever you want. Um the only problem with the teleporter is that it uses a lot of freaking energy. And right now, the reason we don't teleport everything is because uh we don't have enough energy. And uh, and you know, like uh and then we're we're wondering in a world that is like that, do cars even matter, right? Like uh, you know, if you extrapolate enough time into the future, they won't matter, right? Like no software company like Adobe, you know, Salesforce, et cetera, probably won't matter in a world where AI can do anything. Um, but the question is, how long will that time take? You know, there's a period where you know you're still gonna need cars and trucks, despite the fact that you have teleporters, but right now AI is the equivalent of that teleporter, right? It's it's this machine that can do literally anything. Uh, we just don't have enough of the machine.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:46

And and but and that's a great example. And by the way, I just want to talk about you know, a stock we both own that is in the software space that I don't think is going to be negatively affected by this is meta, right? Because yes, they have the the software, which is their social networks of Facebook, Instagram, uh, WhatsApp, but it's the network effect, right? Just because you tell AI to recreate Instagram doesn't mean you're going to have all your friends and people you care about post on there. Um so not all software is going to be uh completely disrupted by this. And that that's where my personal fine line is, is when there's really nothing stopping AI in the future from completely replicating either the software or the deliverable.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:34

Yeah, that's that's a really good distinction to make because the uh the network is the value there, not the software. There's like hundreds of replicas of Facebook and X or um the software that is largely dependent on the networks.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:51

Oh, I'm okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:52

I know we're a little bit over, but I just wanted to first throw this one and then I have one more question that we so I think some this person is referring to something that Meta said in its earnings. It he says meta capex is not slowing down. We're getting a lot of offers for compute at a significant premium over what we paid for it. So just wanted to throw that in there.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:16

Yeah, that's I mean, that's expected. Um, that all this CapEx spend by uh by these companies does not seem to be a waste of uh money as uh dependents on the sidelines seem to be thinking. Um, and I keep having to remind people that these are the smartest people who have built some of the most incredible things on the planet, whether it's Google or YouTube or uh Meta or you know, Instagram or Facebook or uh SpaceX or you know, rockets, reusable rockets, or electric vehicles, or you know, like the people who have made the things that everyone uses today and uh is counting on Windows. And you know, like all these things that we just basically rely on in our lives. The people who are responsible for all of those things, those are the people who are spending all this capex. And they are way smarter than the average Joe, then, than me, let's say. And where's the money? Show me the cash flow or whatever. So the cash flow will come. You know, a reminder that Google for the first 10 years or like six, seven years of its life was uh negative cash flow, right? Uh Amazon for the first 15 years of its life was negative cash flow, right? These companies were investing for the future. Um SpaceX still has, despite 20 years, 24 years of existence, is still negative cash flow. So uh these companies are um sometimes it takes a long time for for the investments to start to materialize, but the expectation is that they'll materialize in the future.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:08

So okay, last one. Um okay, this is a just a discussion that I think Justin will have. For every one PhD in America, China has 20.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:22

Yeah. And many of them were educated in the US, which is kind of also uh interesting.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:28

Um yeah, I I saw this come through and I asked Adrian to put it up because I thought it was funny. Um, first off, China has uh a bigger population than us. So it's not that they should necessarily have 20 PhDs for every one PhD we have, but they should have more uh technically than we do. Um but then is the is the 20 to 1 accurate, by the way? Is is that I don't know if it's accurate. I'm taking I'm taking it at face value. Okay um I I buy it. Why not?

SPEAKER_01 1:07:58

Um population-wise, they're roughly three to four times larger, right? Like somewhere in the yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:05

Um the other piece to this, because I I not that um you said it this way, but the the undertone is that this is negative, that we should have more PhDs in America. And I'll take maybe uh a less popular approach to this, and I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. I'm not I there we should have PhDs, absolutely, but there's a difference between uh doers and viewers, meaning just going out and building and doing earlier in your career as opposed to just learning or studying.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:44

But Dustin, I I would say that China might have more of those too. As they should have a bigger population, but the ratio of that might be even worse than the PhD to uh uh the PhD ratio, meaning China as a whole might have more doers and more people who value education, and more people who value science and technology, and more embracing of science and technology. So, yes, I mean that's a it that's a potentially all of those are potentially very correct observations. And uh the the my viewpoint is that humans in general are good. We shouldn't be thinking of it like, oh, what's good for China is bad for America, right? Like uh I want us as as Americans to um compete in a fair way, but not with the mindset that, oh, if they beat us, we're gonna die, right? Like, or they're gonna take over and become our overlords, right? Like there's this cynical view of the world that like, oh, if Chinese could take over America, they would, right? Like, maybe why is that a given? Like, that's not a uh we we might be getting a little too uh political, but that's not necessarily a uh given thing. And and operating from a point of fear means that you're trying to sabotage the competition or trying to put hurdles in their way or whatever. And like I want China to succeed, and I want those people to build great things because it helps all of humanity and and me uh personally. We already benefit from Chinese manufacturing um talent in the US because everything is made in China. Um but um that's what I was saying.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:28

We're both we're both partners, right? Like China needs us, we need China. Uh at some level, you need your partners to succeed. It is also understandable that that we, as in America, would want to succeed more than China, and China would want to succeed more than America. That's there's an element of healthy or hopefully healthy competition. Competition.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:51

Yeah. But that's also when that viewpoint becomes like, yeah. But when that viewpoint becomes, oh no, they're gonna you know destroy us or something like that, then that that that is not a good viewpoint, in my opinion. That's not a gift.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:03

And and and um again, just to be a little political, there's an element of fear driving policy, right? And that's probably where a lot of this stems from. Yeah. Okay. All right.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:16

So let's uh that is let's end it on the politics. We're like we touched on way too many things. Episode 50. This might have been our last episode.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:27

Yeah, hopefully we didn't say anything that gets us canceled. And even if we do, it's our podcast. We'll be back next week.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:35

That's right. That's right. All right, thanks everyone for watching and uh hearing us, and we'll talk to you next week.