Google Has Fallen Behind

Welcome back everyone. Today on the Jose Carlson show, we'll be looking at my $ 1.5 million portfolio, every single holding and what's going on with them. We have some big questions around Google. They haven't done much this year. Meta has taken off recently. We also have Mastercard and Amazon and so on. We'll be breaking down and looking at the situation with each one of them. Now, we also have a lot of news to get to. For example, Meta apparently just hired the CEO of MongoDB, like the active CEO and a day before their investor day. I don't know how he pulled this off. MongoDB is down like 25% on the news. It's crazy. We also have Jensen as one of the only sane people going on to TV continually talking about how AI is not going to destroy us all. That's the message he's trying to share. And Jensen has his work cut out for him. Because while he's doing that, we have politicians, ones like Andrew Yang, that continue to go on to different appearances, different shows, and share his gloomy view of the future. Well, he talks about how AI is a zero- sum game and automation is a zero- sum game. And this is one of the worst errors that politicians make. It's a complete misunderstanding of economics and business. And I'll be responding to it in this episode. And then finally, in this week's fail of the week, we have Bob Iger. Now, Bob Cheek is the one talking here, so there's two Bobs, but it's not Bob Cheek that's a fail of the week. It's Bob Iger. And I believe this one is long overdue. So, we have a ton to get to in this episode. But if you enjoy this type of content, make sure that you like the video, subscribe to the channel so you can follow along because I share my portfolio every single week, sometimes multiple times a week, and I'll be doing so again right now. What we're looking at here is real money. It's a real portfolio. In early 2019, I started tracking this portfolio publicly on YouTube, and I've continued doing that ever since. The portfolio has grown substantially. The gains have grown substantially. Now, this portfolio is up $57,000. Now, when you look at the year to date in 2026, we're not doing great. It's down 1.28%. About a week ago, it was up like 4%. So, it's bouncing around between a little bit in the red, a little bit in the green. We're trailing the S&P 500 this year. But in investing, you're not looking at the year-to- date as the ultimate truth. That's not the one metric that defines how good you're doing. It's your overall performance. When we zoom out overall, this has had market beating performance. And in fact, it's generated over half a million dollars in gains. And a lot of these gains were made with much smaller dollar amounts invested. I did not start with a million dollars. I didn't invest in day one with a million. You can see in 2017, I had $4,000 in this account. I started it just like anyone else budgeting, putting a couple hundred a week into my account. In 2021, I had around 300 to 400,000. We had the big COVID dip. It went down a bit there, but I kept buying stocks aggressively. And then in 2023 is really where the outperformance begin. After 2023, this portfolio raced up. The gains continue to accumulate and the majority of the gains have been made in only the past couple of years. In fact, a lot of them have come from a select companies that I still hold in my portfolio. So, let's go ahead and take a look at the top positions. In rank number one today overall, it's Google. Now, Meta did jump up above Google for a couple days, but Meta's it's going down. Meta went down like 4% today and a couple percent uh the last market day. So Meta has given up about $8,000 in gains, bumping itself down, but you can see how close these are. And with Google, I'm up $18,000 and a lot of these gains have been made in just the past couple of years. When I look at Google, there's a a couple things that are concerning right now. And the biggest concern is that they've basically fallen behind in the AI model race. Google was in the lead in 2026. In fact, at the beginning of the year, Google had the best model, which was Gemini 3.5 Pro. It was excellent. Did a great job for the time. But then, OpenAI released a couple new models. They released recently Astra, which is incredible. And you have Claude just releasing new ones as well, which are incredible. I know these models very well. I'm always one of the top 1% users in these different tools. And so, I understand the difference in capability between the two. And simply put, CatchBT is just way better, way better than Google today. ChatBT is so much better than Gemini. They're not really that close today. So, we've had seven, eight months now of Google just going nowhere. No new pro model released. They've released a couple light models which are fast and nice for simple things, summarizing emails, suggested responses, stuff like that. But for really in-depth work, going out and accomplishing things, agentic capabilities, it seems like Google has just fallen behind. So, you may look at this and think, "Wow, why am I still holding this $200,000 investment? Why don't I take some gains?" That's because I've seen how quickly things can change in the AI race. A couple months ago, it seemed like Meta was not even on on the map. They weren't even close. And now, Muse seems like it's in the lead with its personalized agentic capabilities. So things can change very quickly with Google. I think you have reason to be patient. Let's go ahead and first look at the valuation. Google today is not trading at a wild valuation. We want to look at the forward PE. It's at a 25. A 25 forward PE is good. It's a healthy PE, but it's nothing crazy. Google's not being priced with incredible levels of expectation. These are good expectations priced in, but not great. We're not pricing in a 30 to 35 PE ratio. Right now, Apple trades at a 35. Google trades at a 25. So, I look at this and I believe that right now we don't have an enormous amount of excess in the stock to begin with. And then if we look at what's actually going on with Google's business, it doesn't look so bad. We have the revenue by segment, which over the past couple of years, it continues to grow in basically every segment. Google search continues to grow like crazy, growing 17%. There are concerns about search in the future with all these agents and assistants. That's one part of Google's business that is somewhat exposed. But Google has a lot of ways of dealing with this. Another big aspect of Google is YouTube. Google overall is around a $4 trillion business. And I believe that YouTube is worth around $1 trillion. We have YouTube not only showing up with its advertising growth, around 12%. That's a little slow compared to the rest of Google, but this doesn't represent all of YouTube because a lot of YouTube's growth is in the subscription category with all of their YouTube premium memberships. Subscriptions is growing around 17%. When you combine these together, it's 15% revenue growth. The cloud is growing like crazy. In this light blue, it grew 57% year-over-year. That's on a trailing 12-month basis. The cloud backlog is up 374% now above half a trillion dollars. Google is also growing its topline quickly. The revenue growth is estimated to be at 23%. So we still have Google growing super fast even at its size 23% revenue growth. Now one thing that we have to pay attention to is it says here that the earnings per share will decline by 27% next year. Now while that minus 27% analyst estimates is technically correct. It's actual real data. That is only because they had massive gains in equity sales of things like SpaceX this past year. When we look at this on an organic basis, Google's still going to grow their EPS next year. Around five or 6% is a current analyst estimate. So, when I look at Google, I'm hesitant to take gains today. I'm not quite there yet. If the company trades up to a 30p ratio, then I'll strongly consider it and I'll likely trim some of my position. But, as of right now, I believe it's still a hold. Next, we move on to Meta, which has had its enormous gain over the past 30 days. My position has actually increased by around $50,000 in Meta in just the past 35 days. Uh it was in fact in the green by $20,000 yesterday. It's bumped down a little bit, but we've had a huge recovery of Meta. I still believe today that Meta is undervalued. It's currently trading today around a 23 Ford PE ratio, which is not expensive. It's still at a discount to Google. And Meta has fast revenue growth. It has a really good product, which is Muse. And Zuckerberg is on a mission. He is not stopping. Now Meta is pushing forward into enterprise. Mark Zuckerberg somehow snatched the MongoDB CEO straight from the company like a day before their investor day. MongoDB shareholders are not reacting to this well. The stock is down 17% on the day. Losing your CEO abruptly is not good news. And in the role of Meta, he's planning on playing a very different position from what Meta typically does. Betting on a new artificial intelligence products and services for its enterprise customers. Mark Zuckerberg also posted on X saying that Meta Enterprise platform will use our strength that few other companies have. Advanced models, leading agents, large-scale infrastructure and years of working closely with many businesses. Initially, we will focus on bringing our full technology stack including Muse Agent, Meta Business Agent, Muse API, Muse Code, and more to businesses and developers to help them grow. I believe that this is good news and in fact I think the market's reaction to this trading Meta down 4% is misguided because there's a lot of upside here for Meta. This is all white space area for them to grow into. They don't already have a business here. So if they start building a direct revenue stream with enterprise clients, which I believe they can, they have all the tooling to do so, then this should cause Meta to open up another revenue segment, which is something they desperately need. So overall, I still believe that Meta is a little undervalued. Not as much as it was a month ago. I think a lot of those gains have been had, but I still see upside in the future for this one. I'm still holding on to it. Now, moving on, we get to Mastercard. $190,000 position now $42,000 in the green. I would group Visa in with this one. I think that you can flip a coin and invest in which one you want. They're both such great companies. I decided to just pick one of them, but I could have I could have invested in both of them equally. When I look at Mastercard, it trades at a reasonable valuation given the economics of the company. When you have above a 50% profit margin, you deserve to trade in the high 25s. Better yet, everything about these companies continues to grow. We can look at the revenue growth by region. Mastercard continues to grow everywhere. So, a lot of people are concerned that these local payment providers or the government will compete with Mastercard, but they're growing revenue in the United States even though this is their most most mature market. We also have Europe where they're growing twice as fast, 14%. We also have the Asia-Pacific area. It's growing 7% per year. We have Latin America, the Caribbean growing 20% there. We have Canada growing 7 12%. So every single territory they're growing above the rate of inflation. I believe in a world of agentic commerce, Mastercard and Visa will become more valuable, not less. So I'm not touching that holding. Now next up we have Amazon. This is holding number four in size, a 12% position. It's a $180,000 position, $55,000 in the green. Now, a lot of people have complained about Amazon because the stock really doesn't rock it up like a lot of other companies. It's been a little bit of a lagard over the past five years, but if we look at the the chart here, it actually doesn't look that bad. Amazon is up 50% in the past 5 years. The S&P 500 is up around 70%. So we have a little bit of underperformance in Amazon over the past 5 years. But if you invested in Amazon any time period during the dip, which it gave you ample time to buy, then then you've outperformed the S&P 500. So unless you bought right at the beginning of the 5-year period and never bought again, you probably have outperformed the S&P 500 investing in Amazon. Furthermore, when we look at the 10 years, this is where it really outperforms the S&P 500. Amazon is up 495% over the past 10 years. The S&P 500 is up around half of that. So unless you invested at the worst time period only only 5 years ago during this plateau of the stock price, that is really the only time period that you had poor performance. The stock has actually done well and it's done so with a low amount of risk. Amazon remains one of the most powerful diversified companies in the world. You're not taking some huge gamble by investing in Amazon. You're not rolling the dice with this company. And I'm very excited for Amazon. Not only do I believe that this company is wellprepared for an agentic commerce world, there is some concern that people will be able to aggregate Amazon. I I think that those concerns are are fair. Amazon does have some exposure there, but they're likely a little bit overexaggerated. Amazon is so powerful. Their logistics network is crazy. You're not gonna have shopping agents be able to just get customers off of Amazon onto other Shopify sellers and it will crush Amazon. I do not see that happening. The reason that people use Amazon in large part is because of the entire experience. The ability to have a trusted seller, instant customer service, a pipeline of all of your all of your purchases, everything in one place. All of that is really convenient. And even in the case of Aentic Commerce, there's also a reason to believe that Amazon could be a winner here. Andy Jasse is for sure going to make it so that they have these agentic abilities built within Amazon. Muse is not going to be the only agentic shopper. You're going to have other ones by both OpenAI, Anthropic. You'll have ones by Google. For sure, they're going to have an agentic shopper and likely Amazon. So, I see all of them playing at this game. I don't believe it's going to impact Amazon's revenue as much as you might believe. At a 26 PE ratio, I still again feel that these companies are not overvalued. I don't believe that Google's overvalued or Meta or Amazon. Investors are very concerned about these companies because of the capex spend, but you're seeing the returns already. You're seeing what they're able to do with their customer base, with the tools that they're they're creating, with the revenue streams that they're growing. The companies that own the distribution and the massive networks are Google, Meta, Mastercard, Amazon, and Microsoft. Over time, more and more of the economics will shift over to these companies. After Amazon, we have ASML is my next largest. This one grew into a massive position. It's a $126,000 position, 93,000 of that being gains. ASML has a very, very good future. We have the install base management, which is a very reliable continual line of revenue continuing to grow as they have more machines installed. We have the geographic mix here. Now, this looks a little crazy, but it shows something here. When we look at for example China, when we look at ASML sales in China, just China, you can see that in around 2023 and 2024, a huge portion around 50% of their total sales were in China, which led investors to believe that there's a lot of concentrated risk here. If there's regulations that could that could concern the ESML investor, well, there has been regulations. The sales percentage in China has gone down. More of it has gone to places like the United States. More of it has gone to South Korea. more of it has gone to Taiwan. China has made up an increasingly smaller portion of the overall mix which derisks the investment in the future because if you believe that China is risky for ASML, well, it's less risky today. It's gone from 50% down to 14. So there's simply less exposure to it. So despite the higher valuation, I'm continuing to hold this one. Now, next we get to S&P Global. This is actually one of the ones that I think is a buy today. S&P Global is down big this year, primarily off of concerns of the SAS apocalypse, anthropic, all these things that make data easier to get. And I believe a lot of this is short-sighted. S&P Global now trades at a 21 Ford PE, giving you downside protection. Yes, a stock can always go lower, but it's difficult when the stock is trading at a a low valuation already with really good economics. We have other indicators. For example, the ETF assets under management continues to grow. This is in trillions. So they had $3 trillion in assets under management linked to their ETFs. Now they have 6 trillion. So more and more assets are getting linked to different Dow Jones indicy ETFs. There is concern that S&P Global will do poorly because when interest rates go up, less debt is taken out, but that's temporary. Companies have to issue debt. They have to renew it. Otherwise, they're going to just pay off all their debt. That's not going to happen. So in any case, I believe S&P Global is a buy today. Next up, we have Microsoft. This one is number seven. a $19,000 position, 55K in the green. So far, it's trading at a 26 forward PE ratio. These are not expensive numbers. There hasn't been many time periods in the past where a group of companies this powerful with this much distribution growing this quickly. High teens revenue growth have been trading in the mid to low 20s PE ratio. I've really not seen anything like this. These companies will get rerated higher when investors become excited about them again. Now the next company I believe is the most undervalued in my portfolio or very close to it today which is Netflix. Netflix has gone down like crazy. Netflix is taking punches left and right. It's getting beat up by the market. Everyone's concerned about it. Everyone believes that people are going to cancel all their accounts, that engagement's going down, that YouTube TV is stealing all their viewers, that none of their content's good. But when you look at the actual numbers, none of that is reflected in their actual performance. Ted Sarandos, the co-CEO of the company, said that engagement is actually up 2% year-over-year. He also said that people's viewing habits of second seasons is improving year-over-year, not declining. So, engagement from season 1 to season 2 has actually improved and that many of the narratives around this company are just false. It just grew 16% which is fast revenue growth. We have total subscribers continuing to to go up. 325 million was the last number that they revealed. We have Netflix's content budget, which is increasing a little bit, but their revenue is growing faster, creating operating leverage. And meanwhile, the valuation on a price to earnings continues to get crushed. It was in September of 2025 trading at a 50 trailing PE ratio. Now, it's trading at a 22. I like YouTube. Who doesn't like YouTube? But Netflix is going to be fine. People have enough time and money. They really do. They have enough time and money to have a YouTube premium membership for like 12 or $15 a month, whatever that is. and a Netflix membership for $8 a month. People can afford $20 a month for the biggest libraries of entertainment in modern history. I think most people will be willing to pay for both of those. So, I don't see the big panic that a lot of people see. I think that Netflix is a company that goes through periods of really good content, then content that's not so good, but they'll have more hit shows in the future. They're continuing to invest $20 billion a year. Next up, we have Costco, holding number nine. I haven't done anything with this company for a long period of time and I don't plan to. Costco is just going to hang out here. The stock is down a little bit, but overall it still trades at a high valuation. Fundamentally, it's doing great. There's really no change here. With Moody's, I feel very similar to how I do with S&P Global. I think the S&P Global is a little bit better deal, but I like Moody's. I think it's going to do great in the future. Texas Roadhouse is another company that I want to highlight that I think is a buy today. The stock price would make you believe that there's something dramatically wrong with the stock because it just sold off a lot. It went down 21% in the past month. So, this one continues to tank. Meanwhile, the fundamentals look strong. The revenue continues growing. The number of restaurants are increasing. The average weekly sales, the same store sales are increasing. The to-go business is increasing. The reason the stock is down is because the earnings are not going to be growing over the past year. In fact, there's a 5% decline in EPS. The reason why is because of commodity inflation. Beef prices go up. Texas Roadhouse holds their prices the same, which means that their net income goes down. Their net income is down like 16% because of commodity price inflation of beef. Now, what Texas Roadhouse doesn't do is they don't say that beef prices are going up, so let's just jack up our prices. They don't do that because that destroys customer trust. People want stable price increases. They want slow price increases. They don't want a company that immediately bumps up prices quickly. So, Texas Roadhouse is playing the long game. They'll take a temporary hit in EPS growth, but then when beef prices go down, their net income goes up like crazy. Next, we have Dualingo holding number 12. It's a $2.2% position. $32,000 position, $14,000 in the red. Now, I get it. Duolingo hasn't worked out so far. Stock's gone down big, and part of that is deserved. Their user growth slowed down a lot. So, the Dualingo team set out to increase their user growth, their daily active users. They're not focusing as much on paid subscribers. So, the paid subscriber metric is flattening out a little bit. And again, that's because they're they're not really focusing on monetization, pushing users to the paid tier. They're focusing on getting new people in, getting them using the app daily. And on that, they're looking very successful. The daily active divided by monthly active user percentage has gone up like crazy. It's now 41%. We have these user engagement metrics. For example, the monthly active user is the brown line on the top and then the tan one on the bottom is the daily active users. Dualingo has 58 million daily active users, 140 million monthly active users and they're they're both increasing. Both of these have gone up. Their daily active users have doubled since 2024. This one will take time. A lot of people are concerned about this more structured courses and learning because of AI, but we'll have to see how it plays out. So far, they're making a lot more course content and a lot of people are joining them. Now, finally, we get to Door Dash and Uber holding 13 and 14. Uber's slightly in the red. Door Dash is slightly in the green. Both of them are around a $22,000 position, around 3% combined. I think Uber is way undervalued at this point. It's trading at $68. Now, there's no guarantee that this one goes up soon. We've seen companies trade at undervaluations for long periods of time. This one's trading at a 17 Ford PE ratio. While all the economics look really good, the big concern is robo taxis. the Cyber Cab, the Whimo, the Zuks, all these companies competing with Uber. It's the first real competition that they faced. I have the belief that this is more than priced into the stock. So even though cyber cabs and robo taxis and all that will eat into some of their market share, Uber continues to expand and grow in market share in other places. And I believe there's also an advantage in having a hybrid model where Uber is both going to have their own robo taxi and they'll have their own human drivers to fill in the spaces where robo taxis can't get. Specifically, places where they literally don't operate and places where there's excess demand all in a short period of time. That makes it very attractive to have a hybrid approach. One app to open that you know you're going to get a driver. Whether or not it's a robot or a human, you're going to have someone soon. Door Dash also traded down over the past month. There's been regulation in New York City passed against them and other things. When we look at Door Dash, we have the contribution margin moving upwards, meaning they're making more money per order. We have the amount of people on their program continuing to climb. So now they have 35 million members under Dash Pass or different related memberships. The monthly active users continues to go up. The revenue by geography is increasing internationally and within the United States. We have total orders continuing to climb like crazy. I like everything I see with this company. I'm continuing to hold it. So there's a little look into the portfolio underneath the surface of just the stock prices. These businesses are expanding. They're powerful. They're gaining customers. They're coming out with new products. Their revenue is growing very quickly. And overall, their earnings per share are growing very quickly as well. And at the valuation that these companies are trading at, I feel very good about the situation today. Now, moving on, we get into this battle between the AI optimists and the AI doomers. On one side of things, we have Jensen Wong, who is an AI optimist. Now you may say that he has every reason to be optimistic because he's the leader of a big company that makes a lot of money from AI. That's true. But you also have the CEO of Anthropic and Chat GBT which are not really AI optimists. They come off more like AI doomers even though they're leading those companies as well. So even amongst AI companies, there are some people that are more optimistic than others. But I want to contrast Jensen Wong here with Andrew Yang. Andrew Yang is a politician. And the reason that I focus on Andrew Yang is because he's very vocal. He's all over the news. He does appearances and I I don't have anything against him. I actually think he's a nice guy. I actually like Andrew Yang's his personality, but I think that he has a lot of things wrong with his takes on AI. And I want to go through and contrast some of the things that Jensen says on this topic and some of the things that Andrew says. We'll start off here with Jensen. We hope it's an engineering problem. I believe it's an engineering problem. I know it's an engineering problem and we all need to hope that it's an engineering problem. If it's not an engineering problem, it's not solvable, right? And so the fact that all of these companies still are advancing the state-of-the-art is because they also believe it's solvable. These are some of the brightest engineers in the world. I work with, you know, all of them. And and these are this is a this is a technically solvable problem. And so the way to think about that is if you look at go back to the the days of the internet you you access a website it downloads application maybe it's Java application all of a sudden uh this application comes into your PC has access to files and uh resources and maybe the applications and tools and uh it gets onto your network. Well in the beginning we had all kinds of viruses. Um but we realize that the web browser itself has to be a containment system. The web browser has to provide that application with minimal rights. Whatever only the rights it needs in order to do its job. And it has access to basically access to nothing unless the browser gives it access. Essentially what we're doing here we're creating basically the modern browser. It's a browser for browser for Asians. >> It's a very good analogy. When the internet was first being born, browsers would essentially let you download anything without any real regard. When you download an executable file onto your computer, you're basically just crossing your fingers that there's not malware in it. And since the browser didn't do any checks, we don't know if it came from a trusted developer. You don't really know what's going on. And in most cases, that's where malware and viruses spread. That was extremely common at the beginning of the internet. But the browser is actually one of the biggest security devices on your computer, the guard between the internet and what gets into your computer and installed. It gives you all sorts of warnings and protections and that's part of the reason you should keep your browser up to date. Agents will have similar restrictions, similar gates that they cannot pass. So this whole thing is just a technical problem. It's new technology, so we're facing some of the same issues. But this isn't some type of unsolvable problem where agents just run off and do whatever they want and we can't control them. That would be a whole different situation. And that's not what's going on. Now, on the other side of things, we have the AI pessimist. We have Andrew Yang, who just went on to Jubilee. And this is the type of thing where it's like one person that holds this view addresses 20 people that hold the opposite view. In this case, Andrew Yang is the AI uh skeptic and then everyone else is the AI optimist. And I want to highlight just one interaction here. In this clip that I'm about to show, Andrew Yang argues that automation is a zero sum game. It's not good because you have to lay off people or fire people. So let's go ahead and hear him argue this >> firm for and so you're not having to do that which is good for you but it's also a a negative for the you know accounting firm you were you would have hired in a past era or like the small bit you know what I mean so it's like zero sum what what's happening is you've extracted value and it's helping you but it's going to you know be less money for like the um lawyer you would have paid otherwise the second thing is that as you try and grow you're going to be ble to do it with fewer people. And I can say this from experience where my company uh took down a job posting for a junior engineer and a junior data analyst because AI made them less necessary and less. >> What he's saying here so far is accurate. I don't think he's exaggerating. Companies can grow with fewer people. So let's hear him make the rest of this point. So, it's going to be good for me in terms of growing the business, but it's going to be bad for the people that I otherwise would have had to hire who like otherwise would have had the ability to benefit from the opportunities that I'm creating. So, what you can see when he's trying to make this point, she's not buying it because that's not true. Because Andrew Yang doesn't hire someone doesn't automatically mean that's bad for them. Uh that's that's the leap that he's making here, which she's not she's not accepting that leap. >> Disagree on your first point because it was mainly the people who had high income that could afford those services in the first place. Lower income people could not afford to pay for a lawyer for tax help to get a certificate program. They couldn't afford it. So it's bridging the gap of the average Joe, the average Jill. >> The big people that make all the money can still afford legal counsel. They'll still have legal counsel. They'll still pay lawyers lots of money. But the small guy that can't afford legal counsel can now run contracts through chatbt or through claude or whatever it may be to scan for different things in the contract to summarize them. They're very good at that. It can make it so that something that is legal jargon is very easily understood by someone running a small business. So instead of hiring a lawyer that you can't afford to begin with to pay them $300 an hour to look at a contract, now you can do that on ChatBT. And that makes small businesses close the gap between the wealthy individuals, between the people that have already won. Now I think that she's right. Uh she has a better part of this exchange than Andrew Yang. But the part that she misses here that I think is the biggest weakness with Andrew's argument is that he argued that when a company lays off someone, that is a zero- sum game. This is a common belief from Andrew Yang and many other politicians that is totally false. It's the idea that automation is a zero sum game. And he just said that in this clip. He said that if he doesn't have to hire developers because now AI can do a lot of what they used to do. That means that while he makes more money, they are laid off. They make less money. That's not how that situation works. Layoffs through automation are actually economically beneficial. It is the exact opposite of a zero- sum game. It's a non-zero sum game or a positive sum game. When you look at what happens with companies that automate different job roles, it works like this. You have a company that has 10 required employees, but then AI comes along and now they only need seven to do the job that previously 10 could do. That means that they can now automate three jobs away. So the company says, "Hey, these three employees, sorry, we have to let you go." Those employees are then let go. That means that the company now has seven employees doing the work of previously 10. The company is more profitable, higher margins, more efficient. The company now can pay its existing employees more money, can give them raises and bonuses. The company can now return more money to shareholders. The company can now invest more money into different companies because it has more money because it's not paying for those three different employees. The company could reinvest and grow new product lines, new businesses, could sign up for different services. those three employees that they were able to lay off while maintaining the same productivity is a huge benefit for that company raises margins, raises productivity, makes them wealthier, makes them so they can invest more. But then you look at the part that he argues is a zero- sum game. He basically is assuming that these three employees that were laid off are going to never work again. That's the only case where this is a zero- sum game. But when people get laid off, they don't just sit around and do nothing forever. especially if they were highly productive people. Imagine for example if Microsoft because of AI could fire 10% of its employee base. So they lay off 10% of their employees. Do you think those tens of thousands of Microsoft engineers and developers are going to sit around and do nothing forever? Not a chance. They're going to start businesses. They're going to start new companies, new software. They're they'll use the skills that they learned plus artificial intelligence to spin up new products and services. Many of them will get jobs at other companies that need talent that now Microsoft freed up and made available in the workspace. But also many of them will create entirely new products. That is a positive sum game. Microsoft in that scenario would get the same level of productivity with 10% fewer employees. Those 10% of employees can now start new companies, new services, get hired at different companies that need their labor. that overall grows the economy. It grows productivity. It grows the quality of life. The amount of services available, it raises competition. The idea that automation is a zero- sum game is incredibly wrong. And that's what you're seeing relayed over and over again. Now, moving on, we get to the fail of the week, who is Bob Iger, not to be confused with the other Bob that was the CEO for a short period of time at Disney, which is Bob Cheek. And I want to highlight this clip. This is from CNBC. We have Bob Cheek here and he explains why he wrote his book and what this book contains. >> In the book you you effectively say that within days frankly of getting this job you believed that he meaning Bob Iger had chosen you and effectively chosen you to fail. And I I I I couldn't get my head around that even even to this day that idea. >> Yeah. I I mean that's certainly a possibility, but I don't know that you even necessarily have to characterize it that way. I think he chose me. Some time passed and if you watch the first interview I did with you guys. >> Yeah. >> Uh uh there is a uh u >> first interview after getting >> after getting the job, right? We we we had I think at you and Bloomberg over to the studio and there was a rigidity, a certain hesitancy and I was called by a reporter and the reporter said, "Did you see his body language?" And I'm like, I was I was obviously sitting there. I didn't want to comment on it. time that I knew that I had a problem was when he did the Ben Smith interview with the New York Times, essentially reasserting himself into the position of CEO without a ever talking to me about it and b from what I understand, my understanding, never talking to the board about it. >> During this time period, 2020, when Bob Chapek became the CEO, it seemed as though Bob Iger immediately regretted stepping down. Like he he immediately wished that he was CEO again. Bob Iger is without a doubt one of the most egodriven cos in the world. He can't stand the idea of someone else controlling his Disney with his vision. He is obsessive, territorial, conspiring. He undermined Bob Cheek and torpedoed any chance he had at success after being the one that selected Bob Cheek and recommending him. That is one of the the worst things I can I think you can do in business. Bob Iger committed it. But not only that, Bob Iger, I just believe generally is one of the most overrated CEOs of all time. He's written books about how good of a job he's done running Disney, combining Marvel and Lucasfilm together. But look at how well Lucasfilm is doing under Disney's control. Look at how well Star Wars is doing. Then we have Disney itself, the company that has likely one of the biggest brand recognitions in the world. And the stock is completely flat for the past 10 years. It's up 14% in a decade and this is Disney under Bob Iger. This is his doing. Now of course he will blame Bob Capeek in his tenure which was very short period of time but Bob Iger has not been able to move this stock at all. And he also hasn't been able to move the earnings per share. So this isn't a situation where Disney just gets more and more undervalued. No 10 years ago Disney produced $5.70 of EPS. Today it produces $4.85. And frankly, I'm glad that Bob Cheek is writing this book. I plan on buying it. I think that this side of Bob Iger, his narcissism, his ego, his territorial control of Disney, and the lack of success in the stock itself, all needs to be exposed. This idea that Bob Iger is this incredible CEO needs to come to an end. That's it for this episode. Hope you enjoyed. See you in the next one.