Chit Chat Stocks - Meta Muse Winners and Losers; Google's Risk; Zeta Global and Adobe $ZETA $ADBE

Episode Date: September 25, 2026

The Investing Power Hour is live-streamed every Thursday on the Chit Chat Stocks Podcast YouTube channel at 5:00 PM EST. This week we discussed: (00:00) - Introduction (02:02) - Zeta Global (ZETA) Business Overview (07:00) - Meta Muse and Consumer AI Agents (11:07) - Airbnb, Expedia, and the Threat to Online Travel Aggregators (13:32) - Google and Apple's Position in the AI Agent Space (17:05) - Meta's Potential Take-Rate Monetization Model (20:50) - Amazon's Resistance to AI Commerce Interfaces (24:22) - The Threat of AI Agents to Uber Eats Advertising (33:54) - Small Cap of the Week: CI&T (CINT) (41:10) - Costco (COST) Growth and Valuation Multiples (45:29) - Cava (CAVA) and the Danger of Restaurant Stocks (51:46) - Adobe (ADBE) Sell Decision and Executive Turnover (56:18) - CrowdStrike (CRWD) Enters the "Palantir Zone" (58:00) - AppLovin (APP) Shift and Episode Outro Aria's YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@QualityInvest5 ***************************************************** Subscribe to our newsletter and join our FREE chat community: emergingmoats.com  ********************************************************************* Chit Chat Stocks is presented by Interactive Brokers. Get professional pricing, global access, and premier technology with the best brokerage for investors today:  https://www.interactivebrokers.com/  Interactive Brokers is a member of SIPC.  ********************************************************************* Fiscal.ai is building the future of financial data. With custom charts, AI-generated research reports, and endless analytical tools, you can get up to speed on any stock around the globe. All for a reasonable price.  Use our LINK and get 15% off any premium plan: ⁠https://fiscal.ai/chitchat  ********************************************************************* Disclosure: Chit Chat Stocks hosts and guests are not financial advisors, and nothing they say on this show is formal advice or a recommendation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Trade election, climate, and economic outcomes with IBKR prediction markets right alongside your stocks and options. Earn interest on your position and receive $1 per contract if you're right. Learn more at IBCR.com slash predictions. Welcome into the Chit Chat Stocks podcast. We are live right now for the investing power hour. My name is Brett Schaefer and you're hearing my voice because this week we have a sub-in guest for Ryan while he's on a family vacation. Aria, Rodnia.

I should have confirmed the name pronunciation before we started by. I believe that is correct. Aria is an individual investor we've gotten to know through fiscal AI, other stuff in the online investing world. And if you like today's episode, make sure to check out his work on Twitter and YouTube,

which I will link to in the show notes before we get started. Before some of the live people start joining us, let me just say, as always, gives a five-star review on Spotify or Apple. Join the community on Substack. That's where we got a lot of listener questions for today,

some specific ones for ARIA, including, let me just tease a little bit of the episode. We're going to do Zeta Global, a little bit of Adobe Rewind, maybe some app Lovin, Uber, plenty of other things, especially with the fact that agents, I guess, are taking over the entire internet. And besides that, follow the show wherever you get your podcast. Let's dive into the first topic.

But first, Aria, how are you feeling in this age? of consumer. I'm good, I'm good. It's solid. It's a very exciting time. I must say, by the way, you absolutely nailed the last name. I think you're the first white guy in history to pronounce my last name correctly. No, you completely nailed it.

So no worries on that. But yeah, definitely a very exciting episode for us today. There's lots happening, obviously, with the MetaMew stuff, Connect yesterday and today. So I'm excited to get into it. Did you watch the Meta Connect report? I just read a summary article. I didn't get a chance. too. I caught a bunch of clips and I've been reading up on it all morning. So a couple different

interesting stuff. Apparently they're charging for transactions, like a little bit of like a take rate similar to Apple's Apple wallet and stuff like that. So I'm sure we'll get into it. Okay. Yeah. Let's let's get to the first of it here. Why don't we just, I think we can go through some of the questions that the listeners had and we can just kind of explore some of the companies. I mean, there's one here that I think we could start on first, which is Zeta Glit. global. We've had a lot of listeners talk to us about this one. I honestly don't really know much about it besides what the listeners told me is kind of some elevator pitches. What is this business and I don't know if you own the stock or not, but what interest you are not in the company?

Yeah, definitely. So I think it would actually be probably best if you guys get Nick Walthmatica on at some point. He is like kind of the guy that is spearheading the whole Zeta movement and all that sort of stuff. He's definitely the one that kind of popular as a stock. That's that I kind of give you a bit of an elevator pitch. At this time, I do own the stock. It is roughly a 12% position in my portfolio, and it's kind of grown into that. I think a cost basis was closer to like 8, 9%. So I'm up, you know, pretty decently on the stock in only a handful of months. To give you the sort of thousand feet view of what the company does, they're essentially, I like to describe it as a CRM for marketing. That's, that's kind of how I like to describe it. That said, they do have, I believe it's

12 different products. So it's not purely just like a software company that, you know, it's just like a software CRM for marketing. They also do compete with like the trade desk and stuff like that. If listeners are familiar with that company and them being a DSB, a demand site platform. So they essentially do a variety of different things to do with marketing and advertising that sort of stuff. And you can kind of think of it as a very enterprise heavy sort of company. In fact, they only have enterprise clients. They have roughly 400 customers, and these are all like Fortune 2000 companies. So it's not your mom and pop shop or anything like that. This is software that usually gets embedded in like the likes of like a American Airlines,

Delta Airlines. Ford, I think, is a client of theirs, right? The holding company behind the UFC and WWE, they're also, I forget what the name of that company is, but that holding company is also one of the big customers of Zeta. And funny enough, actually, they have their Zeta live coming up here in about two weeks, which I will be attending. It's in New York. So that should be fun. But does that kind of give you a bit of an explanation?

I think so. I think so. What, why are they winning in the trade desk not? Or is it not, is the Venn diagram of overlap not as? Very, very slim. Okay. Very, very slim. Yeah.

So they do compete on the DSB side of things, but like that's one product. out of 12. Zeta expands much beyond that. Again, they are sort of like a software company as well. That said, the main reason, you kind of hit the nail on the head there, like the main reason that, you know, Trade Desk is losing in this environment and Zeta is benefiting on the other side is essentially the Trade Desk cannot really prove return on ad spend. So historically, they've kind of done more brand advertising. And we're kind of moving into a bit of an environment, particularly with automotive, with rising gas costs and stuff like that. And the same thing for the airlines.

Consumer package goods and retail, those are all kind of a bit of a down cycle at the moment. And so naturally, they kind of pull back a little bit on advertising. But specifically, brand advertising. If you have advertising that you're doing that you can say I'm, you can confidently say, I'm putting down a dollar here and I'm getting back three. That is the last thing in a down cycle that you are going to cut back on. And so Zeta can prove that return.

on ad spend, but on the flip side, a trade desk, on the other hand, historically has done more brand advertising. And you could think of like the average Coca-Cola advert and stuff like that. And so that's getting pulled back on and they're suffering massively in this down cycle. Yeah, and I hope Zeta didn't alienate their entire customer base by, I forget what the trade does did. They, like, they didn't fake their numbers. I wouldn't accuse them of that, but they essentially misled on performance. I mean, I'm seeing here because Zeta, just look at the financials. We're looking at our friends fiscal AI, of course. You know them as well. Five-year revenue growth of 30%. That's fantastic. I can see why a lot of investors like that. Why don't, as we have some more people

finally join, we have a new listener from Florida. Good evening, everyone, or morning or afternoon, wherever you are. I think, and a lot of people in the substack chat were talking about this is we had all sorts of discussions all week. Is meta, muse, It's at least in the United States and a lot of other countries at the top of the app store rankings at the moment. I guess for those that don't know, it is essentially an agent that it has its own app. I'm guessing it also, I haven't tried it. I use one of the competitors at the moment. I'm guessing it also connects to WhatsApp because Meta also owns WhatsApp,

but essentially it's a little bot that can actually do things for you in the online world. For example, it can make a reservation at a restaurant. It could help you. I use this example when we talked with Drew Cohen the other day. You can actually use it for buying a ticket. I use it for a train. Say I have to take a train trip from one city to another. And instead of saying, no, here's the steps to do it.

It actually will go and do it for you as long as you give it, you know, there's privacy issues and things like that. You have to give it your payment information. But the whole theory here, and I guess what a lot of stocks are getting rocked this week, I saw. Honestly, a couple of stocks in my own portfolio get rocked by this. I'm looking at remitly, maybe even Adian, although I don't really see why that would be a loser because of this. There's a lot of stocks that have sold off. Basically, I know there's tons of different ideas out there of what this could disrupt or not or what have you. But essentially, people looking at it as, all right, if there's any fricry,

in any sort of transaction. If someone was just going off of, all right, this customer is going to stick around because of lethargy or they can't find a better price somewhere else, even if there are out there. These agents are going to do that work for people now. Aria, is that how you've been looking at things with the Metamuse agent?

I know you had a tweet of kind of your first, I mean, these aren't definitive takes, but like what you say could be potential winners and losers, what were your thoughts on MetaMuse looking at your own portfolio? And we'll talk about, I think, specifically, we can fall for Uber for some detail there. Yeah, definitely. So I actually kind of had the agentic moment about two weeks prior to Mews's launch. I started using Grockbot, and then I'm like, whoa, this is Chad GPT launch, like, literally

all over again of like it can actually do stuff. And like, I don't know, I've only used it in very elementary use cases so far, but like, just for example, to give you an idea, it's like, I asked it from a content creator perspective, go scrape my top 30 best performing videos, come back to me what worked, what didn't work. And then it goes through and then it finds the transcripts. Obviously, this takes a couple minutes and whatnot. But like, that is a manual task that would have probably taken me an hour to do. Run it through a transcriber, all this other stuff and bring it all together and then maybe analyze it with a clot in terms of like what worked,

what didn't work. Not to mention, you know, just a whole bunch of stuff with having connectors over to like Notion and Slack and this and that, craft me a prompt to put. into Claude because Claude is better at writing. So it's overall a super powerful technology. Like there's a whole bunch of people that are maybe bears of the technology and of itself. I would completely write that off. I think the key question with Agenic as a whole is how fast does it get adopted? And the fact that Muse and Meta, like they're pushing it out if you just open up the Instagram application, like it's pretty frequently literally the top thing of like if you haven't downloaded it yet, it's pushing you to download it. That is three and a half billion

daily active users that are getting this notification in countries that it's going to become available over the next couple months like that is potentially 3.5 billion daily active users that are just going to have this like slammed at them and like it will gain adoption right so that's the second piece to it is like does agentic do people start using agentic I would argue absolutely yes Brett did you want to say something there no keep going I'm coming my follows what do you pay for the the worries yeah so first things first the technology is incredible. Second thing, the distribution is absolutely there. So the third key question here is what are the companies that previously essentially are doing what Agenic is currently doing?

And what I mean by that, like think of the aggregator stocks, right? The entire purpose of a booking. com and Expedia historically has been there's way too many airline companies, way too many hotels, I will aggregate this for you so that you can compare them altogether. Mews completely circumvents that. Now, I understand like Expedia just partnered up with them and in many cases you might actually end up booking off of an Expedia. But to deny that the core value prop is now at least under question and potentially erodes to some extent, I think is a little bit foolish here. I think particularly in the case of an Expedia and booking, I'm not including Airbnb by the way, and we'll get to that in a second here. But those two companies in specific, they don't have unique inventory. Booking has a little bit more unique inventory and it's about three.

3% of the inventory, the hotels on booking.com are completely unique to a booking.com. So if you can book a hotel on the internet somewhere that's cheaper, that just circumvents these two companies altogether. And this, you know, seriously brings into question the economics of it. On the other hand, you have Airbnb where 70% of their listings, 70% of their listings is completely unique to them. And I would imagine the other 30%, it might be on a verbo, and that's about it. it's very rare that you'll have a Airbnb website for the listings, like a separate website by the owner for their listings. Like it almost doesn't exist, right?

But for boutique hotels on a booking.com, it absolutely exists. For the chain hotels, obviously Marriott's and Hilton's, it absolutely exists. And so if it's cheaper elsewhere or, you know, there's different bonuses and sales and whatnot, maybe you could couple it with points. I have no idea. This changes things. And there's a big question mark over these companies, in my opinion. Yeah, but look at Airbnb, I kind of think there could be, I agree with you, with your take, by the way, the stock is sold off. I think it went up to, yeah, it didn't hit 200, but essentially after a nice earnings report, it went from about 140 to about 180, 190. And it's given up most of those gains. That's one stock I'm watching as a potential like, all right, babies getting thrown out with the bath water here. What about Google? Because personally, I, I,

along with Apple, I don't see them doing much in this space. And I feel like both of them, especially because, you know, as I mentioned, like, it's a top app on the app store. Like, everyone's connecting through their smartphone devices right now, either iOS or Android. And the fact that Google, with all the connections to Gmail, maps, whatever, all the saved history in the data they have with that Apple, they have some of that direct device stuff as well, maybe a little bit different than Google. I feel like, and maybe you can tell me if you agree or disagree, I'm just so shocked that these two companies haven't come out with something yet that's equivalent to these products. Because even look like the one I've been trying to use, instinct, I think it's a team of one, maybe a few engineers that came up with this product. It takes to WhatsApp. I'm sure that those two companies have the capabilities to do so.

I just, it does not make me bullish for either of them. Yeah, I'm continued to be surprised by the fact that Apple's AI is so disastrously bad. It is like Siri is practically unusable other than like setting an alarm. And I also don't necessarily think that they're going to come out with some sort of big agentic thing now. They don't invest in CapEx. They don't have their own models. I have no idea how they're even going to make something like that. That said, if they do partner up with Google or something to make an agentic sort of chatbot or Siri equivalent, whatever,

or maybe with a Google that could get interesting. I'm not sure how they would necessarily monetize that. But anyways, me neither. I'm not necessarily bullish on Apple over this. Google's a bit of an interesting case. A lot of people on Twitter, if you looked at them, they're like, oh, well, isn't Google just going to copy them? And they also own Gmail drive calendar, the whole workspace.

Isn't that even? Why haven't they yet? That's my question. Where is the products? Right. Like, why haven't they, whatever? And my rebuttal back to that is, well, it kind of ruins the economics of search.

And I don't know if you've looked at the search financials at all recently or the Google financials recently. It's like still half of the revenues. And I would imagine even more of the profits of the business. It's probably something like maybe I don't have the numbers, but something like 70% of the profits of Google are still Google search. Granted, it is declining as a percentage, but it's not declining fast enough. And so the reason why Google hasn't made a push into Agenic yet is because if I search, on an agentic interface to go find me the best running shoes at this price that are good for in the snow and also whatever, right? I go search for something. That directly circumvents the previously the Google search of running shoes that are cheap, whatever, whatever. Like that used to be a Google search that has now moved over to agentic. And it like 100% it's going to make the economics of Google's 10 blue links worse than than previously. Right. And so that's my. guess in terms of why Google hasn't done this yet, and it's a huge question mark, in my opinion,

of what are they going to do about it now if Agenic, you know, reaches the masses and actually does become stupid popular. Yeah. And advertising within the Agenic interface seems very, very difficult. And this kind of comes to, we have a question from the live audience here. But would you pay META or XAI to use Mews or Grockbot or any other bot? Tyler says 99% of people would not. I might push back a little bit on that because if this spot, I use instinct, there's, there's muse, there's crockpot, if it's providing me a lot of value, for example, I used it to, okay, for my job of the Molly Fool, I have to scan for various news in the industrial sector. And I use it to search through all these different websites, Twitter, what have you,

to find different news from the past 24 hours. it does a pretty good job with it. It saves me a lot of money. And if it can, just for example, save you an hour of busy work per day, I would definitely pay $20 a month on that. And if the product improves, I'd pay $50 a month.

But maybe that's a specific use case in our industry. On the other hand, you mentioned that Mews might be having a take rate business model here. What did you read on that? Because I haven't seen anything. That could be interesting, especially because they're partnering with like shop pay. There could be a lot of transactions.

What are your thoughts, again, on the paying? And then we can talk about the take rate model. Yeah, for sure. World events unfold in real time, and now you can trade them. With IBKR prediction markets, you can trade election, climate, and economic outcomes alongside stocks, options, and bonds all in one integrated platform. These are simple yes or no contracts, price to reflect the market's view of probability. If your prediction is right, you'll receive $1 per contract and earn interest on your position while you're invested.

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I wonder if my out of office has a forever setter. An IG Private Wealth Advisor creates the clarity you need with plans that harmonize your business, your family, and your dreams. Get financial advice that puts you at the center. Find your advisor at ID PrivateWealth.com. So I think based off of the marketing materials released on Mew's so far, I think they're very much so leaning into agentic commerce. That is like the primary use case. It's shopping, booking flights, and other sort of transactions of those likes. And as you mentioned, yeah, they did partner up.

They partnered up with PayPal, Shopify, a whole bunch of different companies on that front. And they didn't give much details in terms of the actual economics of it. But Zuckerberg on MetaConnect yesterday, he came out and said that they're going to be very generous in terms of the tokens that they provide. So it seems to be, you know, like a very, I don't want to call it land and expand, but that's kind of, that's, that's, kind of the vibe that I'm getting from it, where it's like, they're very generous with the tokens. So the free users, lost leader kind of, right? So they're very generous with the tokens and the usage. So especially for free users of, you know, Claude and chat GPT over the past year, it's like you pretty frequently get rate limited. You know, like you're using it and then you run

out of chats. Sure, that maybe converts to some paid users. But for somebody who's not a power user, they might just stop using the AI and then come back in a couple hours. So I think the goal here is to be very generous with those tokens and the usage so that you essentially don't run out as a free user. And instead, you start using Muse more. Naturally, you start to look for different shopping items through Muse. And then they take maybe it's a percentage. Maybe it's a fixed, you know, 10 cents plus, I don't know, like 15 basis points percentage, similar to like a visa or something like that.

And, you know, the playbook of this already kind of exists out there with Apple Pay. Apple Pay takes 15 basis points just straight off the top of any transaction. that you do with, you know, an Apple Pay credit card or credit card that's inside of Apple Pay, right? So I think that's kind of what they're going for. And it's a genius high margin sort of new revenue business that they're essentially able to spin up and monetize the same three and a half billion daily active users in pretty short order here. So I think that business model definitely makes sense. And maybe that's something that Google could do with Google search. They also don't do ads inside of the actual interface, but instead they take a percentage

any time that you transact. But again, are those economics going to be the same as Google search? I doubt it. It's arguably one of the greatest businesses ever. So we'll kind of have to wait and see on that front. Yeah, there's from Google, 100 billion probably in operating earnings that are at risk here. I think, again, it's not their entire business. And Google Cloud is growing phenomenally well. Gemini is doing okay. But I don't know. I don't think the stock is pricing that in. I thought was interesting on the commerce front, you have meta, getting all these partners. And meta is the type of company that love tossing up the partners. Oh, we're partnering with Shopify on this.

We're partnering with PayPal on this. Amazon, on the other hand, essentially blocked Muse from accessing its website. It's going for the full walled garden approach. I think Amazon is going to be one of the rare companies that can actually pull that move off because, at least in North America, maybe a few other markets at the operate, if I want fast delivery on various items, I know I can get that from Amazon. I know I can get that done in about 30 seconds, unless it's something I'm exploring to search again, and Amazon can retain that sponsored listing revenue, which is, I believe, $60-something billion in revenue

at the moment. Do you think this is a risk to Amazon at all? Because I kind of, you know, is maybe a small moat test to Amazon's dominance in e-commerce shopping. But, but, you know, it's maybe, But I feel like this, unless something changes with the actual interfaces here, I wouldn't be too concerned that Amazon would see chair if they block someone like Muse. Yeah, I must say, Brett, so I just uploaded a video on this like literally yesterday. I love how you're hitting on every single topic. Perfect. Yeah, I just researched this, right? So it's good.

In terms of Amazon, so let's try to differentiate the various different potential victims of agentic commerce, right? So that you have, for example, a Shopify store, which historically, the biggest problem as a Shopify store has been getting traffic to your store. So previously, you kind of have to pay ads for that. Maybe you build an organic brand on Instagram. If you're selling T-shirts, you post about those T-shirts, whatever the case is. Amazon is in a totally different playing field. They are the destination. They don't have to go fight for traffic.

If you want toilet paper, if you want an iPhone charger, if you want something, Amazon is the destination for e-commerce. So they're kind of the 800-pound gorilla that can throw their weight around in the event of Agenic, and they can block Mews. And I think that's like literally one of the only companies that has that sort of a bargaining power. Similar to how you have like Costco that essentially says, okay, like MasterCard or Visa, you have to give sort of like a nice rate to us and we're going to deny the other credit cards. Similar sort of bargaining power at play here, right? And so that's why I actually think Amazon does not stand to, they're kind of neutral in this. They don't stand to necessarily win big because of Agentic because, you know, they're blocking it. But at the same time, they don't necessarily lose anything in terms of search queries getting

sent to other websites because it's cheaper, whatever the case is. Not to mention Amazon doesn't necessarily fight on just price. In many cases, Amazon isn't necessarily the cheapest. They fight on selection because, you know, you can find anything over on Amazon. They also fight on the fact that it arrives same day or next day. go find me another company on earth that can possibly deliver something to you same day or next day. Maybe Walmart could do it in some cases, but even them, they don't have the same logistics as Amazon. They definitely can't do it as profitably. And then not to mention, like, you know,

it's secure payments. You've transacted on it a whole bunch. They maybe give you a special sort of offers in terms of like, oh, you looked at this item. Now this is an adjacent item. They have a bit of a data moat there. There's the reliability of the service. You know, if I buy something, I don't like it, I send it back. No questions asked. Simple as that, right? Like, there's all these different intangibles at play here. It's not just a war on price, which is what Amazon, you know, what the agentic thesis kind of relies on here. Yeah, it's interesting. It could be seen as like, all right, Shopify, could be a winner here. Could drive more volume, but it doesn't really impact Amazon. I don't, again, I think I mentioned it before. If I won something basic, I'll go to Amazon. I think it'll have

Same day or next day delivery. What about Uber? We had a listener question here. Actually, it was in the episode that came out this week. We have with Drew Cohen. He used it as a potential example. I wouldn't pin down Drew of having this opinion as a hypothetical during the episode. Here's what the listener asked.

Drew mentioned that he thinks agentic AI is a disruptive threat to Uber. Again, I'll say he used that as a hypothetical. I'm not saying Drew actually believes that or not. What does Arias take on this? I know he was bullish on Uber. last time he came on the show, given that Uber makes up a decent chunk through advertising. I'm not sure that's correct. You can correct me if I'm wrong there.

What does Arii think will help protect its advertising business, or do you think this threat is overblown, assuming your thesis hasn't changed on the business? I guess he's just asking, what's up with Uber with the gentic AI advertising and, I guess, the threat to have different options if you have your agent booking Uber for you. Yeah, for sure. So I haven't brushed up on these numbers recently, but last I recall, I think Uber's advertising revenues was running at like a $1.6 billion run rates. If we got to imagine that's like disgustingly high margin, I maybe guess 70, 80% operating margins, something in that ballpark. And so, you know, a huge amount of that flows down to operating profits.

On an operating profit basis, advertising for Uber is massive. It's probably, again, rough back at the napkin math, probably something like 20, 25%. of the profits of the business, which is really good historically. But again, as the listener mentioned here, like with the advent of agentic, if those quarries get routed to like just the pizza place's own phone number, whatever the case is, because it's cheaper, does that bring into question the economics of the advertising business or just the economics of, you know, generating revenues on Uber eats? And I would say, actually, yes, there's probably a bit of a question mark over Uber.

Now, is it to the same extent as a booking or, Expedia no, and my argument for that is that if you just go back to how unique is the supply of Uber. And I would argue it's pretty unique, particularly on the driver side of things. It is literally just that driver in that local area. Maybe they're on DoorDash, maybe they're on Lyft, and that's about it. So the dynamics doesn't change on that front, right? But in terms of like, does this potentially open up my local pizza shop? Maybe I book off of their own website or maybe I get rerouted to have them do.

deliver the pizza to my house. I don't necessarily think the price changes that much. And I don't have concrete numbers on this. But I'm willing to entertain the idea that the Uber eats by extension, Uber Eats's advertising economics are a little bit under threat and under question. In terms of the ride segment of the business, which is, you know, the majority of the business, no, nothing changes. It's still literally just Uber and Lyft. And that's it. And kind of similar to Amazon, like they don't necessarily just fight on price. They in most cases do happen to be the cheapest option compared to a taxi, but they also fight on the fact that, like, okay, I can click a button in two minutes my ride is here. Reliability of the service, the customer service, etc., like the fact

that it's completely international. What if Mews can't connect to the local taxi spot in, I don't know, south of Italy, right? Like, that can be a thing. So all these different sort of intangibles are at play here. And the fact that their supply is a little bit more unique compared to a booking.com or Expedia, that also is something that needs to be factored in. TLDR on my thoughts. Uber eats, a little bit of a question mark and we'll kind of have to see on the sort of just core Uber side of things. Like I really don't think there's any sort of impact. Yeah, it's a good point on the food delivery. I agree. Like, yeah, potentially, maybe on some niche cases. Like, I just don't think a bot is going to go to every single restaurant and find

the way to get something delivered to you because they have a guy working at the local pizza place. like that is maybe 2% of the operation. What is that Venn diagram, right? Yeah, it is low, but the advertising, that could make sense similar to the potential Amazon threat there where they maybe don't have as wide of a moat where Instinct can go or muse or bot. Grogbot can go into the app for you or onto the website for you. You're not going to see the advertisements.

Yeah, that's fair. But again, on the right share, I've seen a lot of people use this use case where they go, well, I'll ask the bot to, all right, find me the cheapest way to get to the airport. But when the options are only two, maybe three, if you include Waymo. Internationally, there's usually like Uber

and then one other local player. It's usually a similar dynamic, but you can price check as it is. Yeah, it doesn't take that long. I think the bots are really for something that there's dozens and dozens of options for, and there could be

research and finding things you know we're not out there's not any sort of way to get to the airport that people don't know about unless they're like a foreigner just in just in a city for the first time yeah if i can quickly add by the way something else that kind of just came to me this is something that uber has directly called out in uh previous conference calls i don't know which one specifically and actually we mentioned this in the last podcast that we did on it on on uber so a lot of merchants actually they don't advertise necessarily to make a return on that inside of the uber app which kind of sounds stupid but um they don't make like a direct measurable return by advertising a sponsored listing or advertising with a buy one get one

free whatever the case is they do that for brand visibility in the local area i've seen this play out in where i live as well we had a a local restaurant where they run like a like they have to be operating it at a loss it's a straight up buy one get one on like a pretty expensive dish with lots of meat and take my word for it they're probably losing money on it right but what that kind of resulted in is because everybody goes at lunch and they look at the buy one, get one in my local area, the brand visibility that that restaurant now gets through, you know, their name being out there, through people transacting with them, trying their food. Maybe in the future, they now show up and go to the restaurant in person because it is a sit-down

restaurant. So I would argue a huge amount of the ad spend inside of an Uber Eats is simply due to the brand visibility of is this restaurant around me, showing it to, you know, there's 200 million daily active users of Uber around the world, showing it. to that sort of an audience. And at the same time, even if it's like a chain restaurant, like subway runs, buy one, get one free, right? Maybe there's brand visibility of, oh, there's a subway near me.

Well, subway, there's subways everywhere. But you get what I'm putting down, right? Like, it's brand visibility. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And, yeah, specifically on Uber, again, we don't have to talk about them for the entire episode. We have a few other topics we want to get to. But I'll close.

Yeah, I totally agree with a local restaurant that is quite powerful because, If you're like, hey, look, we got great food, people need to know about this. If you can capture a regular customer, that lunch customer, that family dinner customer, and they are someone that lives in the local area and they stick with you for a decade, like that is a fantastic return on ad spend. And if we're going to help get people to do that, that's great. All right, we have one comment here that says, I think agents will take quite a while to hit actual scaled adoption. It's coming at some point.

But remember that roughly 80% of all adults globally still have not tried, generative AI yet. And go back and forth on that one. That stat, and I saw your face there, that may or may not be correct. Maybe in, like, say, quote unquote, developed countries, say North America, Europe, East Asia,

things like that, I believe the use case has got to be much, much higher. I mean, just think about it, like, are your parents using it? Yes. Like, and if so, like a lot of people, I don't know, maybe not the bots themselves, but degenerative AI like chat GPT, what have you.

I feel like uses is growing extremely quickly compared to other technologies. But on the other hand, I kind of, you don't want to put the brakes down and say, well, usage is high, but obviously the revenue is not that eye because a lot of the stuff is getting sold for free. I guess if you have any thoughts on that, I guess we have some comment here that people see to be defending their Google positions. I'd still, look, I like Google, but they got to get their product line and order. I mean, how fast do you think people can adopt this?

Because you mentioned, meta can just push this to 3 billion people as fast as, you know, the compute allows. Yeah. So that is the key question that underlines every single bare thesis on any stock that we cover here. How fast does it gain adoption, right? Obviously, the thing's going to improve over time and all that sort of stuff. But I don't know. if you look at the launch of ChatGPT, which, you know, greatest tech launch ever, but like, still, like if you take that as even, I don't know,

half of the growth that that had and who's there to say that that's not possible or at least conceivable with what meta's got going on with three and a half billion daily active users they could push it to, uh, it could potentially gain adoption really quickly. Over the next year, we might have hundreds of millions of users of Muse AI. And again, as I mentioned, they're kind of, um, by the looks of it, have treating this as a lost leader. They're way more generous and they can afford to be way more generous in terms of the tokens that they provide compared to a chat GPT or whatever, which is making those losses

off of VC money. Meta's got a disgustingly profitable ads business. They could fund the losses on this for literally forever and then just make the economics back five, 10 years from now through the transaction take rate and whatnot. So I don't know. I have no idea. I can't predict the future, but my hunch is that this thing is going to gain adoption massively. And what really matters is not if a bunch of people in Indonesia, Indonesian people, not that against you, but just the income for capita is not the same as some of the wealthier countries. So if 80% of people start using these things in lieu of, say, Google for a good amount of queries in the United States, that is Google's cash cow.

And that would be a real risk there. Now, we've talked about it. There's the opportunity for other bots. I mean, what has it been a month of these type of things? I mean, Muse was, I think, last week, but, you know, there's been the, you mentioned that Grockbot was a little earlier. Instinct was, I think, a couple of weeks ago. There's a lot of room here for a competitor to come in. I kind of just put my hands up and say, I don't know what's going to happen.

And I don't want to kind of touch it from an investing perspective. Yep, seems fair. All right. Do you want to do a small cap of the week? Are you aware of the segment that we do? Yeah, I'm aware. All right. All right.

I'm an avid listener of Chichat stocks. What we're talking about every week. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. We'll say this one and we'll bring up maybe a fiscal AI chart here. Use our link, fiscal.a.ai slash chit chat to get 15% of any paid plan. The company is C-I-N-T corporation. The listener recommendation, the ticker is C-I-N-T.

unsurprisingly. The company, yeah, it's listed on the New York Stock Exchange, but it is actually a Brazilian business. Here is the fiscal AI definition. C-I-N-T, together with subsidiaries, provide strategy, design, and software engineering services to enable digital transformation to enterprises worldwide. It develops customizable software

through implementation of software solutions, including machine learning, AI, analytics, cloud, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The company was founded in 1995 and is headquarters in Campinas, Brazil. that's basically Sao Paulo. It's an accenture for Brazil, I guess, is what I'm picking up here. It's kind of an IT consultant for a lot of businesses.

They mentioned AB InBev, which has a big South American, I don't think they're headquarters, but a big part of their headquarters are corporate offices there. And they really help implement these type of things. I guess before we get started, and I'll go through a little bit of the numbers here, do you like the accentures the what is it the gardeners there's a few others out there do you have any interest in those as kind of a fallen angel uh because of the AI threat the numbers look all right but I didn't but there's been one very very key update that has that has happened in the past call it two three weeks that I think completely flips the script

makes them investible again okay Darya Amadei came out and had that whole essay thing, AI slow down, all that sort of stuff. And my hunches... He's working with Salesforce. He's working with Salesforce. He's not killing them. He's working with him. Right, right. And my hunch is that because of that meltdown, all the enterprises in the world will essentially now need to put a sort of layer in between themselves and anthropic directly. That layer historically has been IBM consulting, Accenture, Gartner, if they do that sort of work, I'm not 100% positive. But that is the class of companies that kind of historically does that and is a bit of an integration sort of company that does it for the enterprises and essentially could be a guinea pig if something goes wrong. Obviously, hugging face incident, Dario talking about this thing

could make us go extinct, all that sort of stuff. If any sort of, you know, bad thing happens within an enterprise, maybe an agent goes loose and causes damages, essentially all the enterprises of the world need to be able to point blame at someone and it can't be the model company in of itself, right? Because the model company would turn around and just say, well, I don't know, I just gave you the model. It depends on how you are using it. And so Accenture and these sort of companies that do the implementations for them, they will have to kind of serve as that guinea peg of an enterprise could turn around and say it's Accenture's fault. That is their entire purpose. I think they now become investable because they're going to win over a whole bunch of business

for implementation, AI safety, all this sort of stuff. Yeah, and we'll get back to, sorry, there might be a dog in the background there. We'll get back to CINT Corporation. For example, I do some other work with the Motley Fool, and they have implemented one of the models as an enterprise plan. It's very, very useful. You know, it can help with things like, you know, helping people get headline idea generation backed by data, things like that.

But connecting all of the software tools together, which a company even, mid-sized. Mali Ful probably is like a thousand employees. There are so many different pieces of software to connect together. There's people working around the globe. And I was kind of thinking, like looking at this business, yeah, even a smaller company like the Molli could use one of those consultants as their AI transition. But let's go through CIT Corporation. I think it's beaten down like we mentioned because the AI fears. But you could maybe argue that it could be a beneficiary by bringing tools to the Latin American enterprises or even the subsidiaries of multinationals working in Latin America. If we look at fiscal AIs numbers here, they're trading at only 0.7 times price to sales and a P.E. of under 11, even though there might be a lot of operating leverage in this business.

The buyback yield is now 6%. And free cash flow has been solid, but now moving kind of in the wrong direction a little bit. Free cash was a little lumpier and then I would have thought at first glance or would have liked it. first glance. I'll mention, I guess, lastly, the revenue growth rates. I think this is probably why the stock is down as well. You'll get the 10-year revenue growth rate, 23% annually. But if you go down to the three-year revenue growth rate, it's only 5.6%. Still growing. Market caps just $385 million. Enterprise value, $475 million. I like the buyback. I like this as potentially as a fallen angel. And it looks like the revenue is growing significantly. Of course, I'd have

look at what the management team is, and if they have any sort of growing competitive advantages in the markets they operate. I don't think they just operate in Brazil. They mentioned a full list of geographies, but I appreciate the listener who put this on our radar. Ari, have you ever had any interest in these type of companies and could a small cap IT solution provider in Latin America make it into your portfolio? Definitely not.

Historically, no, I haven't had much of an interest in terms of consulting companies. Accentra did look cool. Like it popped up on, I don't know about screeners, but I was looking through a bunch of stocks in one period and like it has good fundamentals. It's down like 50% since the last I looked at it. But I don't know. I do think they become investable. Does that mean it makes it into my portfolio? No. I would way rather buy like a whole bunch of different companies that I like basically know for a fact that will be AI beneficiaries. So kind of like anything to do with payments, Shopify, I actually would argue like I might buy PayPal before I buy an exchanger. I think they stand to benefit massively from agentic commerce.

But anyways, this is a whole other topic. Short answer, no, not really. Any of these sort of consulting companies doesn't really interest me. Yeah, I don't think they're going to lose. And maybe if it got cheap enough, like, look at this one, I mean, even look at the price to book value, it's 1.2. That's not terrible. P.E. down today is recorded 10.5. Like, you probably do fine if they allocate capital, okay.

But is going to be a monster long-term winner? Possibly. But betting on, all right, you're going to be the best consultant. It's a little bit of a commodity, even if some of these ones have been decent long-term winners. Let's see. To follow up to the listener, I guess, who mentioned the usage of AI. It says, Barron's study has gen AI usage at a roughly 27%. percent of people in developed countries.

I guess it's a little lower than I thought. So kudos to the listener there. Yeah, maybe I would have assumed higher. All right. Do you want to talk to Costco earnings? Okay. When I sell my business, I want the best tax and investment advice. I want to help my kids, and I want to give back to the community.

Ooh, then it's the vacation of a lifetime. I wonder if my head of office has a forever setting. An IG Private Wealth advisor creates the clarity you need with plans that harmonize your business, your family, and your dreams. Get financial advice that puts you at the center. Find your advisor at IDPrivatewealth.com. Calculating route to avoid seeing poverty. Turn left to bypass the unhoused youth sleeping on the street. Then keep right to skip by the lines of people waiting for food. Steer clear of the crowded shelter turning people away. Then take the next exit.

Let's stop looking away and get in the way of rising poverty. Your donations help the United Way fight poverty in thousands of ways, like providing food, shelter, and crisis prevention. Donate today at United WayGT.org. I did not look at those arms. Just quickly wrapping on. One more thing, yeah, go ahead. Quickly wrapping on the last thing.

I also don't like that it's in Latam. I don't invest in Mercado Libre because it's in Latam. Never mind some obscure consulting companies. So me personally, just not happening. Yeah, that's fair. That's fair. All right. Costco.

I'm going to go through the number zero. Maybe we could talk about a little bit on valuation. I know we're unfortunately not the heart of earning season. We're kind of in the opposite where it's like a week where you have AutoZone and Costco, and that's about it. But if we look at the comps adjusted for gasoline prices in the U.S., 7.2% comps over the last 16 weeks, so that's the last quarter. Canada, 4.6% other international, 6.2%. And total, I guess, for the whole company, 6.7% with total net sales up 11% for the period. They just post positive comps forever.

I get that the stock is at, and I'll probably look it up here, about 50 times earnings. Here's, I think, a good way to phrase it. What would have to happen for Costco to make? get into your portfolio. Like 30-ish PE, even at that point. Like, I would just buy MasterCard. If I wanted a quality compounder that I think has infinite cash flows for probably the next 40, 50 years completely bulletproof, nothing happens to it.

My mind immediately goes to Visa and MasterCard. And they trade at about 30 times earnings, if not a little bit lower than that. Costco is, in my opinion, in the same boat with roughly the same amount of growth. but like more capital intensive though and more capital intensive yeah yeah but like they both have the same qualities in terms of you know disgusting moat and then also like a huge amount of white space still internationally cash to card it's still like only a third of transactions globally are done on card or digital payments like that is a disgusting white space that could literally go for decades and decades not to mention the tammin of itself like GDP growth is it's happening

So it's, you know, I would just personally buy MasterCard at that point. And I don't know. I don't think Costco could ever make its way into my portfolio. And I frankly don't understand why it trades at 46 times earnings. Yeah, 40. Okay, a little bit down. 43 times earnings. Yeah, I don't either.

We've talked about this plenty of times where it's trading, if something's trading like a bond and you kind of look at, especially today, you can buy a third of your bond for five and a half percent. That's, I think you could even get worse returns on income. Costco over the long term. They have this baby a special dividend. They're not going to have that attractive of a buyback at these levels. I agree.

There's such a big difference. And we actually, I think talked about this last week with Ryan or maybe a couple of weeks ago. Someone asked about kind of the S-tier type companies if you want to use that sort of ranking system and what is a reasonable multiple there. And they're all or all these type of companies, Visa, MasterCard. You even say Air Mez, that's kind of what inspired it. It's been in a dip lately. Costco, a couple of other.

There's one that I know you own, ASML, unfortunately, did get into that viable zone a couple of years ago. Was it two years or maybe last year? I can't remember. There's a huge difference between kind of that high single digit durable grower, maybe double digit durable revenue grower at 50 times earnings versus 25 times earnings. I mean, it's not, it's a totally different scenario for what your forward return expectations can be. Yeah, and I mean, you can look at like MSCI. So MSCI people would argue, especially the bulls on that company, that, you know, like fits the bill of a boring compounder that grows with secular tailwinds around the world. That one was trading at 50 times, 55 times earnings. That multiple has now compressed over the past three years.

The stock has been flat. I'm not saying that happens to Costco, but that is something that could potentially happen when you're buying at that big of a multiple. And in fact, the multiple is actually down. It was trading at like close to 60 times earnings. The stock has been flat the past two years simply because of too big of the starting valuation. Who's there to say it doesn't compress more from this point on?

I just feel a lot better buying MasterCard at 31 times earnings today. Simple as that. And it's growing a little bit faster, way higher margins. It's just the better bet in my opinion for that quality compounder sort of stock. Okay. Do you follow Kava at all? First of all, have you gone there? Have you tried the food?

No, I was trying to go to one when I was in Chicago. but I walked to two different locations. One of them was close for renovations. The other one was just closed completely. It hadn't been there for months. Apparently, I don't know, they moved or something like that, but it was still showing up on Google Maps. I haven't been, but I'm trying to go.

Yeah, I haven't been either. It's come up a little bit on my radar. We have talked about on this podcast that restaurants might be the same rule as apparel, just never invest in them. I look at Kava, though, And that maybe would be the one at the moment at the right price. That could be the exception to the rule. Stocks in a 65% drawdown.

And if we look at kind of their three-year revenue growth, 29%. Let's see. EV to sales. Maybe that's fine for a metric. It's 4.6. You look at that. The forward PE is still 81.

I know there's not, there's some operating leverage that's going to still be in this business. Do you have any attractiveness to restaurants? And if so, are there any that you would like to own in your portfolio? So if I can quickly just say, you guys inspired the never invest in apparel rule for me. And that has saved me so much money. I was looking at getting, I was looking at getting into Nike at like $89, $90 a share. avoided that because of, ah, it's retail, whatever. Same thing, Lulu Lemon, Estée Lauder,

which isn't necessarily apparel, but I think fits that whole cosmetic sort of realm of stocks. It's just retail broadly, right? Yeah, I agree with you. I think restaurants might also kind of be in that camp in terms of never invest in them because they're so risky, I guess, or prone to like, not disruption risk per se, but like blowing up. Like wing stop is another one of these. That one's down like 80%. That company could do no wrong in 2023. It was up, I don't know, hundreds of percent, something like that. These companies don't interest me. If I had to pick one, it'd probably be Chip-outlay. I feel like that one's like the blue chip of all the restaurants. They've hit a bit of a growth slow in the past, you know, handful of quarters and whatnot.

And then sweet green is a little bit interesting to me as well. They recently launched like chicken wraps and apparently it's like doing disgustingly well. Like they're completely at least sold out in many locations and whatnot. And I think it already accounts for like maybe a quarter of their sales, something like that. So it's doing really well. If I had to pick one would probably be Tripodl. That said, Sweet Green's a bit of an interesting play for me as well.

And I think it comes back to the same thing we were talking about. At the right price, it can make sense if you believe in the long-term growth trajectory. I would put Kaba into that one where you go, okay. Let's check how many locations they have. We actually do that live here. for the fronts of fiscal AI. While you're pulling that up, by the way, I wanted to say, like, it's not even that cheap. So obviously on like net margins basis, they're probably still ramping margins.

But even on EVDA gross profit, it trades at like 24 times EVDA gross profit. Yeah. Which like. It's not, yes, especially because you're not going to see that hypergrowth of, for example, like a crowd strike, one of those cybersecurity companies. There's not going to be that sort of operating leverage as well because you're always going to have food and labor inputs that are going to be relatively high. Like, there's never going to be that range unless you're a franchise operator like a Domino's or a McDonald's.

So buying a wing stop or something like that of 100 times earnings or even like, as you mentioned, 20 times gross profit makes absolutely no sense to me. But I'm not totally against a restaurant comps at the right price. Like I see Kava right now, 476 locations. if you said, all right, you're going to wake up in 2035 and they have 2,000 locations across North America, I think they would still be doing okay. You have positive comps. Like you buy that at, I think, a reasonable sales multiple, you can do okay.

But are there better opportunities out there? I think probably. It has to come down to, okay, how many stocks are going to make it into your portfolio? Yeah, I think Kava does okay at the right price. Yeah, maybe not a 20 times gross profit. But is it really a wide moat stock or however you like, however someone likes to invest? I don't think a restaurant could ever get there. No, no, definitely not.

And you're constantly at the whim of shifting consumer preferences. If slop bowls go out of favor in favor of, I don't know, chihuamas, for example, that will have. That's good for Kava, though. Yeah, I like that. Okay, well, you know what I mean? Like, if they go out of favor for some other category of food, right? I didn't even know they have shawamas. This is how little I know about Kava.

But yeah, like, if they go out of favor for some other category of food, like that is going to massively hurt them, you might actually be, even though they might have grown in locations by that point, they might be doing way less revenue per location. And so total revenue ends up declining at that point and that will not be good for the stock, right? Yeah. It's totally fair. Let's see. Listener comment.

Someone says that Rollins finally hit that 25 times earnings group. I will say I was conversing with Ryan offline, and I think Rollins might be his next research episode. And a lot of people have been interested in that. Other topics. All right. Well, listeners wanted to know about the Adobe thesis. I know that's one that I think you maybe recently decided to sell. it's been, of course, a

battleground stock. You've covered it pretty closely. Kind of take us through I think we talked a little less than a year ago. Take us through kind of your journey or the past year. And maybe before we get started, I'll give a context on what the stock price has done. It's essentially gone like into a massive drawdown

and now recovered a little bit. And then well, now it's falling back down again. Yeah. So just like full transparency, I held it for about 10, 10, 10 is 11 months. I had this, you know, huge thesis in terms of the company doing well and re-rating back up. The fundamentals are still intact for that company. They're still growing very healthfully.

I ended up selling it at about a 16% loss at $280 per share, the literal day that they announced the new CEO. I have a bunch of issues. And like, no, the CEO wasn't necessarily part of the initial thesis of buying the stock and why I think it's well positioned. I still think obviously the creative cloud apps that they have, like the core apps are, you know, incredibly well positioned. Like, they're going to continue to do pretty good, at least on a fundamentals basis. But the sheer amount of executive turnover at that company now starts to scare me. And I simply just wanted to move on from that company. And I think that's a bit of a thesis breaker, particularly because like the CEO getting replaced

in of itself, that's not an issue for me. It's who they replaced it with. And at the same time, they get on the conference call. And like, Drew made a video on this, or he did a podcast on this last week that I was listening to. And I'm like, yeah, that literally, right? Where he's like, if there was one question that you need to be well prepared to answer on that conference call is why did you pick this guy? And like they just gave the most like corporate slop back and forth of just like, just utter nonsense in terms of why they ended up picking the guy that they picked. And the guy that they picked comes from the roughly 20% revenue segment of Adobe. something that a lot of people don't know is 80% of the business is the creative cloud apps.

10% of the business is software for enterprises, similar to something like Zeta that we talked about at the start of the episode. Zeta is actually a direct competitor to Adobe's enterprise software suite. And so the guy that they picked comes from that side, comes from the experiences cloud, not the creative cloud portion of the business. And I would have been fine if they just picked him and that's it. But it's the fact that the, what's it called, David Wadwani, the president of the creative cloud side of the business, the fact that he resigned, that's what really ticked me off. I would have probably held the stock if it was just that, you know, the other guy gets selected and then they come on the conference call, hey, you know, we noticed that, I don't know, creative software is getting a little bit more commoditized.

We chose this guy because that's the path we want to take the company. In the future, we want to get into more enterprise marketing software that we already have a pretty solid footh in. maybe it's the faster growing segment of the business. I don't know. That's the direction we're steering the ship. I would have been okay with that. And David Wadwani, he is staying there as the president of Creative Cloud. He's been spearheading that for the past five years, whatever the cases. But that's not what happened, right? It's the other guy got selected. David Wadwani's leaving. And then at the same time, the CFO also stepped down not this quarter of the quarter prior to that. I don't know. A couple different things kind of ticks me off. And I just decided to move on and

and put my capital elsewhere. Yeah, nothing wrong with that. Sometimes, hey, you're not going to bathe thousand in investing. And I heard someone, I believe it was Ian Castell. He's kind of doing a tour with his new book, which I'd recommend people go check out. I haven't read it, but he always does good writing. He said that if you know that there's a stock that, you know, it's been a loser, it's one that's always on your mind, which I feel like Adobe was for a ton of people,

once you sell it, it kind of you get that little bit of weight lifted off the shoulders and you're like, all right, I can put it somewhere else. It's not going to be frustrating even if the forward returns are going to do okay. If you have, you know, we have five minutes left here or actually three minutes now, I wanted to talk about,

and we can also wrap up with anything else on your mind, I have a hot take that the cybersecurity trade has kind of reached its peak. crowd strike which is for all intents of purposes a great company it's about all i know about it is that an ebue to sales of 48 and a half have and this is uh for i guess listeners i don't know something that ryan and i have slightly adopted uh we mentioned a couple times has it officially entered the palenteer zone where no matter how great the business is it's going to trade a 50 to 100 time sales, shop find 2021, where people slightly lose their minds a bit and just go, well,

cybersecurity is going to grow forever and ever and ever. It's going to be the whole economy. And it's like, I don't know. It's going to take a long time for this to get back to a B.E of 30. Okay. I have so much to say on this. First and foremost, we could be the idiots here, right? This could be Palantir 2.0 where it just keeps re-accelerating forever and we get back to 40, 50, 60% growth. It goes from there with the importance of AI. Cybersecurity is disgustingly important as well. Crowdstrike's the main player there. So we could be the idiots here. But I would argue that that that has been like more than priced in here. If you go back about four years, CrowdStrike was also trading at roughly the same valuations of about 50 times sales. But at that time,

it was growing 70, 80%. Right. And this was kind of in like the down swing of the 2021 spec bubble. So today it grows at like 24% on the top line. So about three times slower growth for the same valuation. So the market is like very forward looking in terms of the potential acceleration that could come as a result of, you know, AI and enterprises spending on cybersecurity on that front. I'm not sure it materializes. And I'm not sure it materializes fast enough for Crowdstrike's valuation to kind of be justified at today's prices. 50 times is so egregious.

If I was holding any shares, I would probably have trimmed it, you know, maybe 40 times sales, whatever the case is. Yeah, I think it's ridiculous. I think it's going to get a correction at some point here. All right. I think it marks it for the official chit-chat stocks label CrowdStrike. You're in the Palantir Zone. Way beyond. Way beyond the Palantier Zone.

All right. Rabby Biggs up here. Anything else on your mind, investing-wise? Portfolio. I know ASML has been it's been a massive winner for you. Just thoughts in general. Last minute of the show.

Yeah. Just super quickly on like the Adobe cell. My favorite investing quote ever. I heard it from Bill Ackman, but I think it's a Warren Buffett quote. It's you don't have to make your money back the same way you lost it. And so I am now shoveling the Adobe money into app love

and something we didn't talk about in today's podcast, but I've done a bunch of content on that over on my YouTube. If anybody's curious for that. but yeah that's kind of the company that I'm betting on and I think I can potentially make my money back on so we'll see all right uh aria yeah I guess that's a good a good segue to close things out here what's the elevator pitch on is it just is it only youtube or do you post the videos on Twitter as well what's uh the elevator pitch for I know it's not ari invest anymore it's your I call it the namesake channel just your it's your name yeah just just just Ariadney on all platform. So on YouTube, I post on Twitter. I'm quite active. And then I'm making a huge push on

Instagram and short form. That's kind of an area of focus for me as well. So you can find me on those three platforms. Beautiful. All right. Thank you for joining. And yes, app loving. I know some listeners actually asked specifically about that company. So whatever are you posts on that, go watch it on his own channel. As a disclosure here, we are not financial advisors. Anything we say on the show is not formal advice or recommendation. Ryan I or any podcast, guest. may hold security is discussed in this podcast, may have held them in the past or may buy, sell, or hold them in the future. Aria, thank you once again for joining the show this week as the sub-in for Ryan.

And we'll see everyone next time. Calculating route to avoid seeing poverty. Turn left to bypass the unhoused youth sleeping on the street. Then keep right to skip by the lines of people waiting for food. Steer clear of the crowded shelter turning people away. Then take the next exit. Let's stop looking away and get in the way of rising poverty. Your donations help the United Way fight poverty in thousands of ways,

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