Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing - Apple’s Latest, Hot IPOs, and the Future of AI

Episode Date: September 17, 2021

Apple unveils new iPhones and iPads. Intuit buys MailChimp for $12B in cash and stock. Amazon gets ready to sell Amazon-branded TVs. Coffee retailer Dutch Bros rises 60% on its IPO. Walmart and Ford Motor team up on robo-deliveries. And Taco Bell tests a taco subscription service. Motley Fool analysts Maria Gallagher and Jason Moser discuss those stories and share two stocks on their radar: Teladoc Health and Duolingo. Plus, Karen Hao, senior A.I. editor at MIT Technology Review, talks with Motley Fool senior editor Anand Chokkavelu about machine learning, which industries are being affected the most by A.I., and the new jobs being created. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Because we have your number. everybody needs money that's why they call it money from fool global headquarters this is motley fool money it's the motley fool money radio show i'm chris hill joining me this week senior analyst maria gallagher and jason moser good to see you both. We've got the latest headlines from Wall Street, we will dig into the business of AI, and as always, we've got a couple of stocks on our radar. But we begin with the big macro. Retail sales in August rose 0.7%. Not only does that bounce back from a drop in July, but economists were expecting sales to fall nearly 1% for the month. When you

combine the higher than expected retail sales with initial jobless claims staying near their low for the pandemic, Maria, U.S. economy is looking pretty good considering the Delta variant. Yeah, it is. Those gains in August were prompted by a rise in spending on clothing, electronics, furniture, and home goods. That's boosted by back-to-school shopping, child tax credit payments through the government. Spending for clothing in the week ending September 11th was up 27% year over year. Sales at department stores rose 21%. So with this Delta variant, you do see a shift away from services to things like travel and concerts, but it's back towards goods. So that'll be interesting to monitor going forward, especially as we get closer to the

holiday season. However, the sales of cars and auto parts were down a lot. We're still seeing that slowdown in supply due to the semiconductor shortage. Toyota recently announced plans to slash production by about 40%. Dealership inventories are running low. And I learned that the number of semiconductors in a modern car is over a thousand. So cars really need semiconductors. So that'll be interesting to monitor as well. And something that I find super fascinating that I think has really big implications is that the Atlanta Federal Reserve's wage tracker for August, for the third month in a row, wages for lower skilled workers have risen faster than wages for higher skilled workers. So that's only happened in the 25-year history of collecting this

data in two months in early 2010. So that's great news for the economy since low-wage employees are actually more likely to spend their increases as opposed to higher paid employees are more likely to save. So it could have implications for inflation, but I think that's also definitely something to watch as we move forward in the recovery. But all in all, it was a pretty good sign. Yeah. Jason, Maria mentioned the semiconductors. I mean, we don't want to say that we're out of the woods because we're not out of the woods, but it is nice to see surprisingly good news on the consumer spending front. It is good. And I'll tell you, honestly, personally, I wasn't really that surprised. I mean, my first reaction was, perhaps the level

of fear out there isn't as great as the headlines would like us to believe. I mean, if you're a sports fan, then no doubt you've been watching football these past couple of weeks. I mean, you're seeing what I'm seeing. Stadiums are packed, college and pro alike. Offices are opening back up. Maria mentioned another tail went back to school. Even bars and restaurants, those sales were flat for the month. They were still 32% ahead of where they were just a year ago. All of this points to these signs. I just think a lot of people are ready to move forward. They're taking that step. They're feeling a little bit more comfortable. The vaccines are doing their job. Certainly, shoppers are still turning online. Those non-store sales jumped 5.3%.

But I think when you just take a boots-on-the-ground look at what's going on, it does seem pretty clear that folks are ready to start getting back out there, getting back to some semblance of normalcy. And I think that's a good thing. Earlier this week in Cupertino, California, Apple CEO Tim Cook and several other executives took the stage to unveil the latest versions of the iPhone, as well as a new iPad and Apple Watch. Jason, customers get longer battery life, and shareholders get Apple continuing to charge

high prices for these products. Chris, I think that's exactly what I expected. We were talking about this on MarketFoolery earlier this week. No real surprises, and that's not to say it's a bad thing. I just think we're at a point where that's what these events are about until they can come up with that next life-changing product. I mean, no big deal. Just come up with another life-changing product, right? Come on, this is Apple. I think many were probably disappointed that they didn't unveil some type of immersive technology device, a headset or something like that. But given Cook's fondness of the technology, I think it's safe to say they are working on it. It's just a real challenge, I think, to come up with something, that killer app,

so to speak, on the consumer side, that thing that makes a potential headset or glasses focused on immersive technology, something that makes our lives better. So, that's still a bit of a tough nut to crack, seeing a lot of progress on the enterprise, the industrial side. The consumer side is going to take a little bit more time. But hey, we'll just continue to wait it out until they decide to hit us with something special. The award for Deal of the Week goes to Intuit. The maker of TurboTax is buying digital marketing firm MailChimp in a cash and stock deal worth $12 billion. Maria, it really looks like Intuit is paying a premium for MailChimp. But I got to say their track record on acquisitions over the past decade, kind of hard to argue with.

Yeah, this was pretty interesting. So you had a Credit Karma acquisition for $7.1 billion, which was a very big acquisition. Now they've topped that with this $12 billion acquisition. So we're seeing that Intuit's continuing to expand their product offerings so that it's integrating options for businesses and customers. So it's expanding its addressable market. So it's integrating MailChimp with QuickBooks to help clients better figure out how to target their customers. So MailChimp is focused on digital marketing services, including social advertising, shoppable links, automation products. It has 13 million total users globally, 2.4 million monthly active users, 800,000 paid customers, with 50% of those customers outside

the U.S. So, it's definitely expanding that product offering. So, it's an interesting acquisition. We'll see how many of their customers want to integrate those offerings, how a new pricing structure will work. It's definitely a hefty acquisition. They definitely paid a premium for it. And so, I think it'll be interesting to watch and see how it goes. And right before we started recording, we got the news that Intuit is going to have a dome, Because Steve Ballmer, a former Microsoft CEO who owns the Los Angeles Clippers, the Clippers announced they've got this brand new dome they're building starting in, I believe, 2023. And the naming rights have been purchased by Intuit. So the Clippers are going to be playing

at the Intuit dome. Who doesn't want a dome? It's a 23-year agreement that costs about $500 million. And a fact about me that no one's ever asked about is I've only ever been to three basketball games in my life. And one of them was an LA Clippers game. And the Dome was very nice. So I may be going back to the Intuit Dome at some point. I wonder if they're going to get a tax break on that thing. I mean, once you spend $12 billion on MailChimp, I mean, another half billion for the naming rights, that's just a drop in the bucket. The Everything Store is getting an early jump on the holiday shopping season. In October, Amazon is going to start selling Amazon-branded TVs that range in price from $400 to $1,100. The company is also planning a three-week event in

October around sales of beauty products. Jason, global beauty is estimated to be a $500 billion market. When you consider that, I guess a three-week event makes more sense. Yes, it does. It turns out there is a lot of value in having two core businesses that the world more or less cannot do without at this point in retail and cloud. Those are Amazon's real specialties. Having those two core businesses to rely on gives them the opportunity to take bigger risks, try new things, and more importantly, fail without truly jeopardizing the business. It gives them a chance to learn. Our house could always use one more TV. I'd be lying if I told you, I wasn't at least entertaining the idea of getting one of these TVs, Chris. But it makes a

lot of sense. It's essentially a little bit more of a vertical approach, giving Amazon more control over that user experience. The connected TV advertising market is tremendous. We're talking about $13 billion plus this year according to eMarketer. It's forecast to reach $25 billion by 2024. Amazon taking more control of that ecosystem gives them the opportunity to participate more in that market opportunity, which makes a lot of sense. Then they can leverage that through their e-commerce platform and other places. In regard to the beauty event, I totally agree. This is a massive market opportunity. We've seen a lot of the success that Ulta has witnessed to date here. I think this is a smart move. Beauty products and cosmetics, they're a tremendous

market, like we said. We talk about school and the three Rs, reading, writing, and arithmetic. Well, I look at beauty products, honestly, there's a three Rs going on there with beauty products, too, right? It's reliable, resilient, and recurring. And so, I don't blame them at all for trying to pursue that market opportunity. Well, and the longer Amazon is around, the more it seems like they don't really do anything unless they can get multiple uses out of it. We had talked a few weeks ago on this show about Amazon opening up large department stores. And one of the things we've traditionally seen that works and helps bring traffic into department stores are beauty counters and the ability to test those products in person.

Yeah, absolutely. We talk often about investing and typically the best action for long-term investors is inaction. You always want to do something, but really the best move is to probably not do anything at all. Just sit on those shares that you own and keep adding to those winning positions. Amazon's in the situation though for this business, really, they always need to take action. They always need to be doing something. And like Jeff Bezos had always said, he wakes up every day feeling threatened from the competition, nervous about the competition. They're always going to be trying new things. They don't always work, but they glean lessons from those things that they try. Certainly, the beauty products initiative

just plays right into their e-commerce expertise to begin with. Up next, we've got a hot IPO and a busy week for the business of deliveries. Stay right here. This is Motley Fool Money. Chris Hill here with Jason Moser and Maria Gallagher. On Wednesday morning, Dutch Brothers went public at $23 a share. The drive-through coffee chain is based in the Pacific Northwest, has nearly 500 locations, and the stock is definitely off to a good start. Shares of Dutch Brothers up 60% on its first day of trading. You tell me, Maria, how worried should Starbucks and Dunkin' be? I mean, I think Starbucks and Dunkin' are thinking about kind of smaller chains always. But if you're thinking about direct competition, if you're

comparing based on size, Dutch Brothers has 471 locations in 11 states. Dunkin' has 8,500 locations in 41 states, over 11,000 locations worldwide. Starbucks has 15,000 locations and a market cap of $135 billion. So I wouldn't be that nervous that they're going to take a lot of market share. And like you said, it's only drive-through. So Starbucks, I think, has carved out that niche as a good study spot where people go and sit and spend time. So maybe more of a competition for kind of quick on-the-go like you see with Dunkin'. Some facts about Dutch Brothers that I think is pretty interesting. It's the largest IPO in Oregon's history. It was founded by two brothers who operated an espresso pushcart in Oregon in 1992. Sales were up about 60% in

2020. It added 71 new company-owned locations, so it's a mix of franchises and company-owned, and they have a goal to have 4,000 stores across all of the U.S. It has a really well-known brand name in the stores it currently operates, so I think it'll be an exciting one to watch, but I wouldn't be too, too worried if I was Starbucks or Dunkin'. This coffee chain's IPO is bigger than Nike's? Adjusted for inflation, apparently, yes. Oh, nice. Nice bragging rights in Oregon. The delivery industry is getting more crowded. This week, Ford Motor and Walmart teamed up to test robo-delivery services in Miami, Austin, Texas,

and Washington, D.C. And shares of DoorDash rose nearly 10% after getting an upgrade, based in part on the belief that over the next five years, DoorDash will expand significantly into delivering groceries, alcohol, and other items not affiliated with restaurants. Jason, which do you want to take first? Well, I mean, let's talk about DoorDash. I mean, I think I absolutely blame you. The delivery space is here to stay, of course. To my mind, it's very plausible that non-food items outweigh food in time. Something like DashPass that they offer holds a lot of potential there, if they can grow the offerings available under that DashPass subscription. That's, I think, $9.99 per month subscribe, and you can have your deliveries

sent at zero cost or very low cost, comparatively speaking. Over time, we've seen the power of a subscription model based on offering the customer more convenience prime. Younger generations coming up view driving a little bit differently than perhaps we did. We were talking about this a little bit earlier. Car ownership is not necessarily the priority, at least for some earlier in life. In some cases, and this could grow over time, I think delivery could be seen as less of a want and more of a necessity, which then clearly plays into DoorDash's advantage as well in moving beyond food. Ultimately, I think regardless, the real path to profitability in this space is automation. I appreciate those bets that Walmart and the like are taking. That's going to take a

little bit more time, but I do believe that automation in this space, that's what's going have the greatest impact on these companies' bottom lines. It's going to give them the opportunity to scale that out to the largest customer base as possible and make it work, I think, most effectively. Jason, do you think delivery is now at the point as essentially an offering where once upon a time, every retail business had to figure out what is our online strategy, what is our e-commerce strategy? Is that now the case with delivery where businesses basically have to decide, okay, either we're going to partner with someone or we're going to try and build this ourselves? I think you have to choose one or the

other. Absolutely. I mean, to me, it fits into that omni-channel strategy, right? I mean, that is part of the omni-channel strategy is ultimately being wherever your customers want you to be when they want you to be there. If you are a business, retail, food, or otherwise, opening your doors today and not considering some type of delivery component, you're missing the Last thing before we move on, where does delivering people fit into this equation for you as an investor? Where do you put Uber and Lyft on your list of delivery-oriented businesses that I might want to buy shares of? I love the service as a consumer, but clearly the economics have not shaken out yet like some would hope. Again, perhaps

The path to profitability there is automation, but the safety implications are far different when you're talking about delivering people versus delivering pizza, liquor, groceries, whatever it may be. That's going to be a bigger hurdle to clear. It's not to say it can't be done, but I think that's a little bit further down the road. Yum! Brands is the parent company of KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell. The company is testing out a new subscription service at taco bell locations in tucson arizona customers can start trying out the taco lovers pass you get one taco per day for a month the pass costs somewhere between five and ten dollars maria it's tacos as a service how interested are you in this either

as a customer or as a investor i mean it's a great deal if you're a customer you'll break even in a couple of days. I mean, I don't think it's a great deal for your body as a customer. It can't be good for you to eat that many tacos. But I think it's kind of interesting. It's only in Arizona, about 17 locations. They said they could roll it out nationwide. I think people who are ardent fans of Taco Bell are thrilled about it. So I think it'll be kind of funny to see what happens, but I don't think that it's going to be rolled out nationwide because it's just too good of a deal. Jason, I don't want to bet against the people who put this idea to work. I'm sure they were very thoughtful about it. Tucson, Arizona, that's a big college town. Is it

possible that instead of rolling this out nationwide, they just target big college areas? Well, I feel like with Tucson, Arizona, given the location, don't you think there's probably a slew of great taco joints out that way? I'm not sure I'm going the Taco Bell, first and foremost. But I also understand, it's college, it's a late night, you're probably not that picky. I want to know, can I bank those tacos? Does it have to be one per day? Or can I save them up and have like, starting on Monday, can I have seven tacos on Sunday? I mean, that's the question, really. No, I have the answer for you. The answer is no, it's one per day. In the same way that Panera rolled out their coffee subscription program,

and it was like, no, one coffee, because I asked the people at Panera. I feel like maybe we need to consider evolving, consider iterating this offering a little bit. But all seriousness, I love that they try this stuff. Whether it's KFC Crocs or a Taco Bell resort, they just try these things that are wonderful marketing tools. They keep the brand front and center, and clearly a lot of people love the offering. Hats off to them for trying something new. All right, Jason Maria, we'll see you later in the show. More companies are spending more money on artificial intelligence than ever before. Details after the break, so stay right here. You're listening to Motley Fool Money.

Chris Hill Welcome back to Motley Fool Money, I'm Chris Hill. According to Fortune magazine, in a survey conducted last year, 34% of businesses said they would spend anywhere from $500,000 to $5 million on AI initiatives. When that survey was conducted again in 2021, the number of businesses saying they would spend that amount rose to more than 50%. To learn more about the growing business of artificial intelligence, we turn to Karen Howe. She's the Senior AI Editor at MIT Technology Review. Recently, she sat down with my colleague Anand Chakravallu, a Senior Editor here at The Motley Fool, as he asked her about where AI talent is going, which industries are being affected, and the

new jobs being created as a result of AI. What's the difference between AI and machine learning and does the distinction matter? Yeah, so machine learning is a subset of AI and this was one of the first things that really confused me that I had to learn myself. So machine learning is specifically AI where the AI learns through statistical methods. There are other branches of AI where you're teaching the machine or encoding knowledge in the machine in completely different ways. Um, like there's another school of thought called old fashioned AI or old school AI, which is really about actually creating like databases of knowledge and then, um, relating all of the knowledge within the database so that the brain, so to speak, can then rapidly retrieve

information based on questions that you might be asking. So that that's like usually the brand of AI that IBM likes to be involved in. And like IBM Watson, when it was playing Jeopardy, that was like the AI that it was using. But machine learning is all about, let me take like a massive amount of data and then like have the brain crunch through numbers using statistical techniques to figure out what are the correlations and relationships within the data. So at that point, you're not explicitly telling the AI how to actually relate the knowledge. It's discovering the relationships itself. So it doesn't, I mean, these days, most of the AI that you see is machine learning based. So in theory, it doesn't really matter the distinction because

if someone says AI, almost definitely they're talking about machine learning. But if you do want to start parsing through, you know, getting into the nitty gritty details of startups to figure out whether you should invest in them, it's good to have a little bit of knowledge on what are the differences. But folks who don't follow the spaces, you know, as closely as you do, can you give us one or two tales from the cutting edge, things you're seeing and writing about that would make a lay person just go, whoa. So this is, this is like hard for me because I, I spend, I don't spend a lot of time talking with lay people. So sometimes I like see things and I'm like, oh, people probably know about that. And then like, I talked to a friend later and

it blows their minds. Um, but like one thing that I've been following for the past three years is deep fakes, which is like AI generated media. And, and it used to be like AI generated images, and then it became AI generated videos and then audio. And now we're talking about AI generated text. Um, and the technology in that space has just advanced so quickly that, um, it's really remarkable and freaks me out a lot sometimes. Um, but just the other day I was looking at, um, there's like this new movie that's coming out with, uh, I'm, I'm blanking on the actor's name. Some A-list actor is called Reminiscence. Hugh Jackman, right? Yes. Hugh Jackman. Thank you. Yeah. So there's this movie Reminiscence featuring Hugh Jackman. And it's all about this idea of him,

like going through his memories and trying to recall, um, a lover that he once had. And to promo the movie, they created this site where you can upload a photo of someone that you're trying to reminisce about. And it uses the steep fake technology to animate it, um, and put it into some scenes in the movie. And it, I was really impressed because I've been seeing this technology evolve over time and you know a lot of these the applications of the technology um the more the more creative applications of the technology can you can sort of detect some wonkiness happening um but with this like site it was it was pretty flawless and pretty seamless and i was like it's we're basically ready for this technology to be incorporated in in movies do you have a feel

or if you're one of the best minds or folks in AI, where is that talent going? Is big tech where you go or is it a startup? Is it somewhere else? Is it academia? It's very much big tech at the moment. It's Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and a little bit of Apple as well. I think that is slowly starting to change though, very, very slowly. I think a lot of researchers have started having more qualms in like the last year or so about actually using their talents to aid just big tech giants growing bigger. Um, and I think that that's sort of like, um, it's very much part of the just general wave of, of tech lash sentiment that's happened in the last five years. Um, and so I have seen more researchers start thinking about when they, when they leave big

tech companies, um, some have gone back into academia. Some are actually starting like nonprofit organizations or some kind of non-governmental organization to do their research. Um, and others will break off and start startups, um, because there's just so much opportunity to fill in those those cracks um yeah but but by far the most the most number of researchers um are at big tech companies are there any industries you can think of that won't be affected you know pretty meaningfully by ai in the coming decades you know something like people might say well what about consumer goods what about like a coca-cola that kind of thing Oh, I think Coca-Cola has already been affected for sure. I can't know. I don't think I can think

of a single industry that wouldn't... I mean, there are some industries where machine learning might not be affecting the core aspect of the industry. I don't know, in beauty, for example, there's some machine learning that happens at the fringes that is not necessarily um, about like the essential, the core products that the beauty industry sells, but, but even there, like you have like stitch fix that, you know, in making the boxes that people get there. Right. Now, I don't know whether that's real AI or not. I don't know if you have a, a, I have no idea. I've never talked to stitch fix about their, their AI, but right. Like every industry, like there's some kind of, um, AI opportunity in like the logistics that's

happening or, um, in like with like any kind of like online retail or anything like that, there's always something happening with image recognition and product recommendation. And yeah, there's just like so many, so many opportunities, regardless of the industry that I can't really imagine any, anyone that won't be affected. And it's, it's easy for most of us to envision, you know, self-driving cars and what you, that you need some AI for that. Right. As soon as I said Coca-Cola, you said, Oh no, no, they're, they're likely definitely using it. Can you give folks just kind of an example of what types of things Coca-Cola could benefit from, from AI? Yeah. Um, well definitely like the behind the scenes, which is like the

logistics, um, like I'm sure Coca-Cola has like a very intense logistics operation and that could be optimized with AI. Um, but also like there, there are definitely a lot of companies, I don't know if Coca-Cola is among these, but there are many food companies that will use machine learning to experiment with different flavors. Um, like they'll, they'll, they'll develop some machine learning system where they feed a lot of data on user preferences to this machine learning algorithm. And then it'll like come up with new combinations, like Lay's chips does this. Um, and they've come up with some like really random combinations that have, you know, hit a niche spot in the market this way. And, and Anheuser-Busch also does this with their beer. So that's, that's like another

more like forward or consumer facing way that machine learning could, could be involved. No, that's a, that's a great answer. I think that helps a lot of us just kind of visualize or think about what, what's actually happening. When we, you know, whenever there's a new technology, it usually brings some fear of current technology, you know, losing your job, right? But let's, let's go to the positive side. What kinds of new jobs will actually be created by AI? It's a complicated question. I mean, um, so I think the most common, I just wrote a story yesterday about, um, robotics, a new wave of robotics entering warehouses and automating some of the picking work and box packing work and things like that. Um, and there's been some

studies in, in earlier waves of automation that I've looked at the firm level. How does, you know, a robot coming in to automate some, some jobs end up affecting the workforce overall. And effectively what usually happens is a company will become more productive because they're able to automate some stuff and then more jobs will be created from that productivity, but it won't be the same jobs that were automated away. So, um, if you're a warehouse worker, you might become a robot supervisor instead of being the one that's packing the boxes. You're the one that's watching the robot pack the boxes and kind of stepping in when it inevitably falters. Um, but I also, if you're packing more boxes and fulfilling more orders, then you're going to

have to have more staff to handle deliveries and more staff to handle logistics. So there's going to be more job creation downstream from where you automated and increased productivity. But effectively kind of what happens is in a lot of instances, you end up gouging out the middle skilled jobs because that's the sweet spot for AI technologies to automate. And then you end up generating a lot of low-skilled jobs, which are the supervisors of the AI, and then high-skilled jobs, which is like the downstream second-order effects of the increased productivity. So in some ways, yes, we are going to see more jobs over time, but also we're kind of breaking the career ladder where we just are increasing the extremes and removing the middle. So I think that's just

something that that technologists and policymakers are really going to have to think hard about because it's that's not necessarily a good trend to be going down perhaps relatedly our last question more important for kids to learn a foreign language or coding oh i would say a foreign language um just because you know machine learning has become increasingly commoditized to the point where you don't actually need to know how to code anymore. You can build machine learning models with very little coding knowledge or no coding knowledge, and that is increasingly going to become true over time. And what a lot of AI experts have realized is what's more important is actually domain expertise in the particular industry

that you're going to apply AI to. So I would say just learn another language and maybe have domain expertise in that language, and you'll be just fine without coding. If you want to keep up with the latest in AI, you can read Karen Hao's coverage online at technologyreview.com. But up next, Maria Gallagher and Jason Moser are coming back with a couple of stocks on their radar. Stay right here. You're listening to Motley Fool Money. As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about, and The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear.

Welcome back to Motley Fool Money. Chris Hill here once again with Maria Gallagher and Jason Moser. Remember, you can catch this show every week on radio stations across America and on your favorite podcast platforms, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and more. One click of a button. That's all it takes, people. One click of a button. That's all it takes to follow or subscribe to this show. Our email address is radioatfool.com. Got a note from Danny R., who writes, long-time listener, first-time emailer. Chris has mentioned a few times that he believes having exposure to cybersecurity is essential for most stock portfolios. Would it be possible to hear a breakdown of some different companies in this space as a primer?

Thanks. Love the show. Thank you for that, Danny. Thank you for the question. Jason Moser, what do you think? Well, you see, Danny, sorry, I couldn't help it. You can look at this a few ways. For me, I know cybersecurity. I agree with Chris, it's very important. I also know my scope of knowledge in the space is extremely limited, and unless I become a specialist in the space, which I'm not, that is always going to be the case. For me, I look at a company like Cloudflare, for example, as one that fits my style. It's a stock that I own, of course, as I've talked about on the show before, because there is a strong security component to the business, but there's also a whole lot more. There's edge computing,

it's a content delivery network. There's a lot to it. It's like Amazon in that regard, it's a diverse business, it's not necessarily reliant on one thing anymore. I feel like I'm getting that cybersecurity exposure that I want with a company that I believe in, but that doesn't really put all of its eggs in one basket. That's one way to look at it. Maria, what about you? Maria Gallagher Yeah, I would say similar. I think a lot of us here are generalists, so we look at a lot of different companies. I understand that I'm not a software engineer and I probably will not become a software engineer. So, I ask myself some questions when I'm looking at these kind of

complicated sectors to understand, to break it down into kind of digestible parts. So, what customers is it serving? What are they doing it well? So, you know, what are its retention rates? And you can watch a lot of YouTube videos of a lot of these more complicated companies. Cloudflare is a great example where they have a big YouTube presence where you can see what does this company do? What is the edge? And I really watch a lot of interviews with people who work their leaders at the company and see if they can speak to people at, you know, at their level of knowledge and understanding. And so getting to a point where I understand it enough and I can understand, you know, what is the difference in what it does and what is the difference between

them and some other players. And I know some other players in the, in the cybersecurity space are CrowdStrike, Zscaler. Those are ones we've talked about a lot. And so I think, I think looking at all of those different aspects of it is a good way to make it more, more digestible for an average investor. All right, let's get to the stocks on our radar. Our man behind the glass can, Boyd, is going to hit you with a question. Jason Moser, you're up first. What are you looking at this week? Sure thing. A company I've talked about here before, Teladoc Health, ticker is T-D-O-C. It's just a neat headline that crossed the news this week. They are partnering with a company

called Proxime. Proxime is a healthcare technology company based in England, and they enable clinicians to virtually participate and provide support for procedures from anywhere around the world. But the reason why this is so cool, among other things, Proxima uses augmented reality to let surgeons supervise and consult on operations remotely. So it gives them the ability to show where to make an incision or how to utilize a particular technique actually during surgery. So just a neat, I think, logical step for virtual healthcare in that regard. But I got a good question on Twitter this week in regard to the pullback in Teladoc shares lately. How is it logical. I encourage you to remember, valuation in the near term is rarely logical, it's very

often emotional. To me, this seems like a reset after a really big deal with Livongo, some profit-taking from a year of speculation. Just remember the words of Ben Graham, he said, in the short run, the market is a voting machine, in the long run, it is a weighing machine. We're just going to focus on Teladoc getting heavier and heavier year by year. Dan, question about Teladoc health? Chris, you know how I know that nature is healing out there, because Jason's back on Motley Fool money, talking about Teladoc Health, one of his two favorite stocks, that, and McCormick Spices, of course. Man, you know me so well. I've always got a seat at the dinner table for you, my man.

Maria Gallagher, what are you looking at? On my radar this week is Duolingo. If anyone knows anyone who's learning languages, I'm sure they're familiar with Duolingo. In 2020, there were over 500 million downloads. It's the top-grossing app in the education category. And on Google, people actually search Duolingo nine times more than they search the phrase learn Spanish. And so its revenue increased over 100% in 2020. I think it's going to be really interesting to understand what will stick as people go back to life more, what was just kind of a phase of playing on your phone, gamifying learning, and what will continue to be what people do as life gets more back to normal. But I think it's a pretty interesting company.

And the ticker symbol? D-U-O-L. Dan, question about Duolingo? Is Duolingo still doing those really somewhat aggressive notifications on your phone about missing lessons? They try to gently encourage you to log on and complete your lessons. I don't know. Every time I have a friend who's doing Duolingo, it's sort of like they show me these notifications and it's ominous if you miss a lesson. It's not as ominous as the app CoStar.

So if that's your barrier, it's fine. What do you want to add to your watch list, Dan? Well, Teladoc is a fantastic company. Jason's been talking about it for 300 years. So I'm actually going to go with Duolingo because while I'm familiar with the service, I'm not too familiar with the company. Well, how do you think I've lived so long, Dan? Jason Moser, Maria Gallagher, thanks so much for being here. Thanks for having us. That's going to do it for this week's edition of Motley Fool Money. The show is mixed by Dan Boyd. Our producer is Matt Greer.

I'm Chris Hill. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week. We'll be right back.